Strait Shooters

Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026. I am John Putthor. It's the editor of Commentary Magazine. With me as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John. Happy Earth Day. Is this Earth Day? I believe it is. Okay. So we had Pot Day on Monday, right? So 420, right? That's both Pot Day and Hitler's birthday. So congratulations to everybody who decided that Marijuana Liberation Day should be celebrated on the day of Hitler's birthday. And then today we have Earth Day. What are you doing to commemorate Earth Day? I'm not – don't answer that. Okay, moving on to Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth. Hi, John. And I think it makes sense that pot day and Hitler's birthday would coincide because you need something to take the edge off. Fair enough. And social commentary columnist at American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John. I just want to note that every Earth Day I celebrate by doing a wellness check on Al Gore, as should we all. Really? And you don't see much of him. I saw this footage, by the way, earlier this week. Jenna Bush Hager, George W. Bush's daughter, who is a correspondent for the Today Show, interviewing the four living ex-presidents on the 250th birthday of the United States. And Bill Clinton, who is Clinton and Clinton and Bush, I believe, and Trump, all born in the same year, all born in 1946. Trump is not being interviewed. And Clinton looks old. I mean, it's almost like I didn't entirely recognize him. Not wrinkly or anything. It's not that. He doesn't quite look like himself as he ages. That's not a criticism. It just is a sort of interesting fact, whereas George W. Bush looks more and more like his mother every day. Their little repartee between him and his daughter, from the clips I've seen, is very sweet, actually. It looks like it'll be an interesting interview. Yeah, and Biden looks even more like that Jeff Dunham, old guy puppet. Like every day he looks more and more like the Jeff Dunham old guy puppet whose name I can't remember. Anyway, because we mentioned Al Gore and I don't think I've seen Al Gore in the flesh or on broadcast or anything like that in a long term. Hence the wellness check. Oh yeah, okay. Well, let us know when you have that happen. So So a naval war has begun in the Strait of Hormuz. We have turned back eight ships. According to reports yesterday, eight Iranian ships were met with the American blockade and were turned back. and three ships this morning, the Iranian news agency claims, have either been fired upon or seized or basically brought into dock or onto shore. And so Trump has said he is extending the ceasefire, but there's no ceasefire if the Iranians are actually firing on ships, apparently to no real result. Like this was just sort of like warning shots or something. Nobody was injured. No damage was done to the ship, supposedly. But this is naval warfare. It's not like a Navy ship. It's not like two pirate ships in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride firing cannonballs at each other. But it is military action in bodies of water that involve seizing, controlling, or manipulating shipping. So I don't know what it means that Trump says the ceasefire is still on. We also have reports that he has time-limited the ceasefire to two to three days to see if the Iranians can get their act together on who exactly might be negotiating with him. We have all kinds of weird reports about how the IGRC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, has essentially taken over the government. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Actually, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has taken over the government, has arrested the Speaker of the Parliament and the Prime Minister. That's unconfirmed. There was a story, Jesse Waters reported last night on Fox that the Ayatollah, whom we understand to be in severe medical straits, has been taken hostage. Who knows? Because J.D. Vance is still in Washington. He didn't fly to Islamabad. So if there are talks, they don't involve the high level players. We don't know who their players are, who we can negotiate with. and the whole question is is the war going to resume in the next 72 hours or not because I don't see I think if the war doesn't resume the question of whether or not Trump will starting to blink will really be uppermost in people's minds because he stopped it and he then said that The streets were closed, and they are closed, but now the Iranians are also closing them. So that's my completely incoherent setting. The Times has a story this morning with just that headline, that to the Iranians, Trump blinked first. That's the narrative setting in. It's the sort of thing that usually provokes him into doing something, into taking action. Well, it provoked him last night to a personal attack on our friend and contributor, Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal, who said that the Iranian perception is that they're playing Trump for a sucker. And then Trump raged at Eliot and said, no one's playing me for a sucker. And it wasn't that Eliot said that Trump was being played for a sucker, rather that the Iranians were giving every indication that they believed that they were playing Trump for a sucker. But that, I wouldn't call that a Talmudic difference. It's pretty there on the surface. But it was invisible to Trump, who really didn't like a headline saying that the Iranians think they're playing him for a sucker. So I would like it that he is being let known that the Iranians think they're playing him for a sucker, so at least he understands what their game is, that they're playing a different game from the one he thinks they ought to be playing, which is they ought to be looking around and saying, we're being ruined and destroyed and we have no hope of any kind of military – prevailing in any kind of confrontation. so we ought to wave the white flag. And they're like, that's not the game we're playing. We're playing a different game. We spend a lot of time on this show talking about the long arc of American institutions, how they rise, how they decline, and occasionally how they come back. One of the industries that more or less disappeared over the last half century was watchmaking. Like a lot of manufacturing, it moved overseas. But today's sponsor is trying to reverse that trend. 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Yesterday, the headlines and the general theme of the news around will there or won't there be another round of talks. the theme was all about how Trump, because of his unpredictable actions and past actions, has caused so much distrust among the Iranians. They can never be sure that he's really negotiating in good faith, that the U.S. is negotiating in good faith, because it could start up a war at any moment. And then Trump extends the ceasefire, and then now it's Trump, blink, Trump, blink. John, you didn't talk about it incoherently. It's very hard to talk about coherently because we have absolutely no idea what is going on in terms of who is running the Iranian regime, what factions have what other internal factions there, who will come out on top. what Trump's next move is and when that next move will come. I mean, the thing about Trump blinking is that he doesn't, even when he supposedly chickens out, it's usually just a delay. You know, there are people who argue that, who were certain that he had chickened out of this war entirely before it even began because of the time between his saying to the Iranians, help is on the way, and then the first strikes of Operation Epic Fury. So, you know, I just, I'm not, I can't look at this in terms of if he waits two days, it means X. If he waits three days, it means Y. He does things on his own timeline here, and so far, I don't know. We have one domestic example of him being bested by his opposition in some sense, and that is ICE in Minnesota. I don't want to compare the significance or seriousness of that scene with what's going on here. but they made this big show of force the other side made a big show and then there were a couple of bad incidents and he got rid of the leadership and he fired this guy and that guy and he brought in Tom Homan to run things and Homan lowered the temperature and essentially ended the I'm calling it the siege of Minneapolis but it was no siege But the aggressive forward moving into Blue Cities to make his point stopped. And so did they blink? They blinked. It was, I think, a rational thing to do. They were doing something adventurous that wasn't working out the way you should be able to shift your strategy if your strategy has diminishing returns. But I'm just saying we do have a recent example just this year of him sort of calling a halt to something that doesn't look like it's working anymore. I'm here to talk to you about Aura Frames and Mother's Day. 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Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. I want to talk to you today about quince, and it's an interesting day to do that, because last night I decided I needed some shirts because I've decided on the podcast, if you watch it on video, that I should wear button-down shirts with ties. And I have some kind of cheesy old shirts that are kind of fraying. And what did I do? The first thing I did, I went to Quince. I went to the Quince website. 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Go to quince.com slash commentary for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash commentary. I would say that the difference here is that he does seem more committed to defeating Iran, and it's a more, I don't want to say principled, because that's not how he operates. But the same time that we're wondering if he's going to keep extending this ceasefire, the blockade, all the destabilization, which is his strategy, that he feels to be a winning strategy in most things. destabilize the other side so they don't know what's coming next and then do whatever you want. And he has also sent a third carrier to the region, the USS, I think it's the George H.W. Bush, to join the Abraham Lincoln and the Gerald Ford. And that'll put a lot of troops back in that area, almost as many, I think, as we had at the beginning of the conflict. So that's a signal to me that we still have the option of resuming the war and targeting areas in Iran. I do think part of why he lashed out at Elliot Kaufman's completely reasonable piece is the same reason why he stepped back from the brink on ice, and he doesn't like negative domestic media coverage. He's not gone on the attack totally. That was the first time I think I've seen him very much personalize that issue. But the destabilization technique, people give you a little bit of time to see if that works, and then they get sick of it. And so we will see if that happens now. I think the sending of the carrier gives him the option of resuming targeting. But both he and Iran seem to want to be playing this game. It's almost like a game of chicken, right? They're both claiming, oh, we can walk away. We're in control. It's open. It's closed. Both sides seem to be doing that. I think the main issue here is China's still standing back and not putting any pressure on Iran. And at some point, we do have to know if there's someone we can negotiate with on the other side. I think that's part of the destabilization that they couldn't have predicted and that is making his ability to strategize right now more of a challenge than it otherwise would be. I just want to remind you – The Iranians can't – they can't afford a prolonged crisis over the strait and China is more sensitive presumably to oil prices and imports than we are. So I not really sure why there so much stress about the standoff as long as if he looking for a deal and he has what John Bolton used to refer to as the zeal for the deal that obviously a problem But part of the reason it a problem is because time is not on Iran side And I and it and it absolutely, you know, I and I don't really understand the argument that it would be. I think that there's I think he's frustrated. And I think the stuff with Elliot Kaufman is comes down to. I mean really as you were saying, Christine, but he's been super frustrated by how this war has been portrayed in the American media and some of that portrayal, a lot of that portrayal doesn't even make any sense as we've discussed on this podcast several times is that it's totally unrelated to what's happening. But one of them is this idea that the Iranians have us right where they want us because of the strait. And I think that's a ridiculous thing. I think he wants the Iranians to understand that they have no choice but to find a resolution in this because we can outlast them on the economic front in terms of the specific damage that the fight over the strait, that the choking of the strait is doing to both sides. Okay, so here's where I would disagree with you, which is that a totalitarian regime or an authoritarian to totalitarian religious malocracy can absorb a whole lot of pain. Way more pain than we could ever imagine that they could absorb if their choices are making a deal that will fundamentally and ultimately lead them to have to relinquish power. or just living with the unbelievable pain that is going to be caused by the cessation of their oil exports, the cessation of the business in the strait that is so important to them, and the economic pain that is being visited on individual members of the government by new and crippling sanctions against them as well as sanctions against Iran and all of that. they're willing to slaughter tens of thousands of their own citizens. They are willing to immiserate millions upon millions of their citizens in order to cling to power. If they believe that any capitulation to Trump means an inevitable kind of regime change, they will hold out as long as possible. It's not that they have us where they want us. The only thing that they have on us is that we are increasingly impatient. And the polling, they can read what we can read. NBC's poll has Trump at 33%. 30% of Republicans now disapprove of the war in Iraq. That number was 10% two weeks ago. If you believe that these polls are accurately registering anything that really matters to the public, and so they don't have us where they want us, but they can take a lot more punishment and we and the question is can trump which is an interesting transition point to the question about what happened last night in virginia uh which we'll get to but i just make i'll make the point about it and then we can talk about virginia which is trump is in a weird position he's got terrible poll numbers he's got almost three years left to remaining in his presidency and it's really hard to be an unpopular president. On the other hand, he's not running again. On the other hand, it seems to now be a pretty much open and shut case that Republicans are going to lose the House. In a weird way, that gives him more freedom of movement than any president before him in a circumstance like this. He is not going to face the voters again. He will not be there. even to imagine that they can get to 51 seats in the Senate because of Graham Plattner's Mishigas in Maine and because of some of the stuff we talked about yesterday with the Democratic Senate race in Michigan. Michigan, they need as a hold, Maine would be one of the seats that they had to take. They need to win four in order to, three or four, I can't remember which. And it's not looking like because they're going extreme in some of these primary battles, it's not looking like they're going to get there. So Trump doesn't have to worry about removal or having both houses of Congress like going at his jugular. and so I don't know it's like he probably doesn't like no one likes being unpopular but I don't know what pain is going to be inflicted on him by keeping the war going like his polls aren't going to get much worse than this so he should just the only way out is through see if you can change flip the script change the narrative by winning not by negotiating but I I mean, that's my analysis of the situation, but maybe I'm wrong. I'm perfectly happy to entertain the notion that I'm wrong. I agree with you on that. But I think the other thing that factors into Trump's thinking here is just the fact that he always wanted a short time limited war. regardless of what happens in the midterms. That was his plan. He loves that plan. He doesn't like an extended war. But one of the things that we've seen ever since October 7th is that when you try to stave off battles and slow wars down, or halt sides or impose shaky ceasefires. It always has the unintended consequence of dragging it all out, making it worse, allowing sides to build up in a sort of equal way so that the fighting will now last longer when it resumes and all the rest of it. So we could have spent the past two weeks, the U.S. could have spent the past two weeks bombing the crap out of more targets in Iran. which we might spend the next two weeks doing anyway, which would have meant, and we would have done it more effectively, because there's been some time to recoup on the Iranian side now. So there we are. You know, this gets back to Gaza and Biden and Israel, right? The war in Gaza lasted two years. It didn't need to last two years. It lasted two years because the United States kept imposing terms on Israel to slow down, to halt, to cease fire, not to do this, not to move there, Kamala looking at the maps and all of that. And the Israeli strategy, which did evolve over time into one that was more precise and targeted and successful, nonetheless, if Israel had been let alone to do what it would have done, it is likely that what we call the war in Gaza would have been over in a year and not two. That is what happens when you start fiddling around with the mission and confusing domestic politics and public opinion and all of this with the simple aim of prevailing over an enemy in a conflict that involves arms and bombs and things like that, which is nobody wants a long war, right? There's no such thing as wanting a long war. World War II lasted as long as it did, in part because the United States and Britain had to get itself into position to land on the European continent. And once we were in a position to do that, which took until 1944, there was all this ancillary fighting in North Africa, Malta, Italy, but not coming up through Africa, but not the landing in Normandy. That was because we weren't prepared. We had to make all the tanks and build all the boats and have everything ready to have this armada go and then go through Europe and finish things off once and for all. And same with the Pacific, where we were fighting the Japanese over tens of thousands of miles of ocean, you know, and islands and countries spread from, you know, Burma to the Philippines to wherever. And it's not, you know, this took time. This is a much different set of circumstances. This war is localized on an admittedly large, but one single country, two serious militaries together going at a military that is fundamentally compromised or semi-destroyed that doesn't – whose only vote in the enemy gets a vote thing appears to be this body of water. So Trump was right to want a short war. I mean this gets at something that we were talking about with – we had Fred Kagan on the show earlier this week. And what came out of that was the idea that diplomacy can – as we're saying now, diplomacy can lengthen the war. Like everybody says, well, why don't you try diplomacy? But you don't always get a negotiated end to the war. Sometimes you just get ongoing negotiations. So if your choices are ongoing negotiations or ongoing conflict, sometimes they mold into the same thing and become a frozen conflict. And he's – that's what happened in Gaza. There was no diplomatic solution in the end because Hamas was not going to agree to something that actually led to their own full disarmament and expulsion from the Gaza Strip. I mean whatever is left of Hamas, the remnants, whatever. The same is true, is it not, of Iran? I mean, when we asked Fred, is there a realistic process that could verify that Iran is in compliance with whatever deal we strike with them over their nuclear material? And he basically said no, right? I mean he was – he's sort of like, oh, I suppose – but Fred's answer was basically no. There's really no deal that would accomplish what we want to accomplish and that the Iranians would also agree to and then comply with. So it feels like I'm not really sure what we're what we're looking for here in a deal. But to me, a deal is always an off ramp for us, not for them. The deal is always an off ramp for us because there were not a deal. The right deal doesn't exist. If the Iranians are willing to allow this – to allow their own country to bleed out over choking the strait, then they're certainly willing to drag out negotiations about who takes control of what nuclear dust and when and whatever. So that's the thing is that there does – just like in Gaza, there does not appear to be a deal that you can hold up and say, OK, this would do it and both sides would agree to it. And therefore it sounds to me like there's no deal. The pause, though, this is important, I think. I'm glad you brought that up. The pause does give, even if Iran is in a much weaker position than the United States, and I think this is what we're seeing in the last few days, the pause gives Iran a chance to escalate the conflict in different ways that do benefit them. It doesn't mean that the ultimate end is going to look any different, and then we have to respond to the escalatory move, and that's what we're doing with the ships. And I think John's right to kind of call it an undeclared naval war. that could continue to escalate. So then the negotiation point begins at where we are now, not where we were a week ago. And for Iran, that makes it look like more of a player than it might otherwise look like. And so I think that whatever their strategy is, which we don't know, they are still keeping their chess pieces on the chessboard, even if they only have one or two left. And that's where I think the brinksmanship that Trump has found and the belligerence and the chaos that has worked for him in other contexts has a shelf life for this conflict. And not just because of the domestic political context, but because of the particular kind of enemy he's facing across the chessboard this time. See, it's interesting because you mentioned diplomacy and frozen conflicts, right? And I was just thinking back to the two greatest works on the subject of American foreign policy, which are Henry Kissinger's two memoirs of his time as the National Security advisor and secretary of state. That's White House years and years of upheaval. And if you have not, if you are not, if you are a student or a reader of works about American foreign policy or about American history in general, and you have not read these two masterpieces, you should get to it. It's going to take you a long time, but they are magnificent accounts of this period from 1969 till 1976 and and and what it was like uh to do these things and one of the major topics is the par is the discussion secret discussions with the north vietnamese in paris uh and elsewhere beginning in 69 and then ending with the paris peace accords in 1973, and you want to talk about a frozen conflict, I mean, they would sit and they would have the same, it was like no exit. It was like Sartre's no, I mean, they would sit and have the same conversation over and over and over and over again, because the North Vietnamese had literally no interest in making a deal. Their plan was to wait America out until America exhausted itself. And so the negotiations, their negotiations were part of the war process for them. And we were reduced to having conversations with them about whether they thought the French Revolution had been a success or a failure, which famously, Lederstow said, it remains to be seen whether the French Revolution was a success or a failure because they had nothing to talk about. We wanted to talk. We were looking for a deal. We were trying to figure out how we could get through this. And they were like, okay, we're going to sit at a table and we're just going to be very passive and just say no a lot. And it drove them crazy. And it's a great description of how what you might consider an asymmetrical conflict, world's biggest military, right, versus this guerrilla force, admittedly getting supplies from our adversaries in Russia and China. But nonetheless, they were not a ragtag force. They were a very serious, very seasoned, very well-trained military. But they weren't us, and we could bomb them into the Stone Age, as notoriously General Curtis LeMay, who ran Operations of Vietnam, said. but you couldn't bomb them out of existence, and they just waited us out. And we have this weakness for the idea that sweet reason is the way you can bring these things to an end. But in truth, all successful peace deals involve somebody having lost and then negotiating the terms of surrender one way or the other. And maybe they're good and maybe they're bad, but they aren't like, well, the war is halfway through, haven't really won it yet. Let's negotiate. What incentive do the Iranians have to give in to us, except if they think they're licked? And they clearly don't think they're licked. So we can have J.D. Vance go to Islamabad. We can have Witkoff and Jared talking to whoever, but they're not licked yet. I'm asking the Pakistanis, by the way. I still remain firmly convinced that that is a poor choice for a negotiating partner. Right. Well, I think to one goal that they should have in mind is one they can take from their Gaza talks, which is the Gaza talks have stalled. The process has stalled, but it has taken a permanent chunk out of Hamas's territory. Hamas has paid a price, a specific tangible price, and if the talks go on forever, if Hamas tries to run out the clock and this just stays in perpetuity, they will have in perpetuity lost half their territory. There is some permanent punishment. There's some price that they've had to pay in order to get to the point where they think they can freeze the conflict. The question for Trump and Iran and you can – that is what Israel is trying to do in Lebanon too, right? By not letting those villages get by not letting the villagers repatriate back south to Lebanon south until Israelis can move back to their homes in the north they are looking to make something permanent out of that That's what Trump has to look for in Iran. There has to be a way that if they try to drag this out, if they hold it, they have to have lost something permanent, something real, something tangible. Okay, but using the Gaza example, number one, the rockets have ceased firing from Gaza to Israel. So in that sense, Israel won the war. Israel's reservists are out of Gaza for the most part. In that way, Israel won the war. The hostages came home, including the bodies. In that way, Israel won the war. In no way did Hamas win the war, right? In no way can Hamas say, we stood up to them and we're fit. Now Hamas is cornered, caged, in a hole, and doesn't have any ability as yet to torment Israel. The question with Israel, and that's sort of like us too, is will the Israelis get tired of holding on to that 58% of Gaza? Will they decide that they've had enough, as they did in Lebanon, after taking that area that they have now retaken, giving it back essentially to the Lebanese in 1999 because they couldn't take it anymore, and then having to go back in in 2006? And now going back in in 2025, Israel doesn't want to occupy Gaza. Israel doesn't want to occupy that land south of the Latami River in Lebanon. That is not its goal. It's not its imperialist aim. It does so as a protective measure and doesn't have any, like, you know, commitment, ideological commitment to holding on to that territory. And so it's a democracy, and this is at some point going to become a political issue inside Israel. The weird thing is, as I keep saying, we're negotiating with ourselves. We're having this peace deal where Trump is negotiating with himself in exactly the sense that you talk about, Abe, which is he didn't want a long war. The war is now longer than he wanted it to be, and he is going to have to take a deep breath and sigh and say the war will be as long as it has to be for us to achieve victory. and maybe he will see that playing it this way has not been helpful because it's now given the Iranians the ability to take these three ships and say, oh, it's a tit-for-tat game now. You say you're closing the straits, we're closing the straits. You're not going to let our ships out. We're going to take ships that come through and we're going to basically dry dock them and effectively, I guess, hold their crews hostage or something. so he's got to decide that and in my mind like he's got no choice now and you know maybe he's mad because he doesn't didn't want to do it this way and maybe jason willick and neil ferguson and the sort of the right the right wingers who oppose the war are like see he never should have done in the first place now yo see here we are and we've gotten into this this is what it means to get into a quagmire, and it's only a quagmire if we don't do what is necessary to make the Iranians say uncle. It's only a quagmire if we slow ourselves down. And Trump has already at least escalated the rhetoric to a point where if we don't destroy their civilization, he will have moderated his goals. He said, I'm going to destroy their civilization unto his day. okay, I'm not going to destroy it now. It's sort of like the dread pirate Robert saying, I may kill you tomorrow, but I'm not going to kill you tomorrow. I mean, it's like he's already gone as far as you can go rhetorically, so basically anything he does that's less than that is relatively moderate. Okay, but that right there, I think the Iranians read in a very different way than I think Trump expected them to. That's where they see that bombast. They see those, you know, crazy truth social posts. And we can roll our eyes and say that's not the kind of rhetoric we want to see our commander in chief deploying. But whatever, that's Trump. I definitely don't like it, as I've stated many times. But what are the Iranians seeing? They're seeing a lot of bombast and a lot of swagger. But they're watching the act, the actions here. They're watching the delays. They're watching the again, the escalation that happens with their Navy, our Navy and their ships. And I think that's where, again, I just don't think that strategy, which has worked well for him in real estate and, you know, in a way in Venezuela. And to Abe's earlier point, I think he did think it would be Venezuela, Iran, and then move on to Cuba. And he's kind of hit a speed bump here. And I think that's because he has to be a little more nimble and change his strategy now. I started with one shop, no college degree, no big investors. It was just a willingness to work. Over time, that one shop turned into a multi-billion dollar business called Crash Champions. All the lessons I learned along the way came from the grind. And that's what my show, Podcrash, is all about. We have real conversations with people who've built things the hard way. We talk to founders, athletes, and blue-collar leaders who kept going when things got tough. You'll hear stories of grit, leadership and growth, plus real-world lessons you can take back to your team and your life tomorrow. when you get momentum, you step on the gas. That's how you get separation from everybody else. I was at Harvard Law School. I was blah, blah, blah. I looked up. So I'm going to tell you something. There's kids in my neighborhood putting in sheetrock that are smarter than you. AI is going to disrupt the law stuff. It is never going to disrupt physical blue collar trade skill. And the guy just looked at me and he said, it's bloody impossible. So I asked him this question. I said, it's impossible unless... That's Podcrash with me, Matt Ebert. Watch on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts. One, he wins, even though he loses the popular vote. Second, he comes back after January 6th, after the indictments, after everything else, and wins the popular vote and wins exactly what he won the last time in reverse. So he's a genius at getting himself elected. No one has ever done anything like this before. You know who else was like this? Obama. Obama, an unbelievable, unparalleled genius. He comes out of nowhere. He takes down the most famous person in American politics who was supposed to sail through to win the presidency. He has a very potent first 14, 15 months as president that end up being politically disastrous for his party in 2010, losing the House by 63 seats. And so he shows that while his ability to get elected president did not then translate into his ability to help his own party, by the time he leaves office in 2017, he has lost more than 1,000 elected seats, state, local, and federal, over the course of his presidency. But in 2012, wins a reasonably – not as commanding a victory as in 2008, but he wins by four points. He wins what looked like a tied election. He actually won relatively comfortably. A genius at getting himself elected. And then in 2014, the Senate loses nine seats in the Senate and essentially loses the presidency. His party loses the presidency afterwards. Trump coming into office as a political actor, mover, shaker, playing around both in and out of office, who he wants to be run for Senate, what he wants to do. And then all of this stuff with redistricting, mid-term, mid-decade redistricting. So he makes sure that Republicans don't take the Senate in 2022 with his psychotic preference for lunatic candidates with split personality disorder who were great football players and stuff like that. He doesn't win the Senate, and he champions this mid-decade redistricting effort that starts in Texas. And he has just had his second massive defeat in this, or the Republicans have now suffered their second massive defeat in these redistricting. One, the referendum in California last year, and now the successful vote here, also a referendum, I guess, in Virginia to lead to essentially a net gain of four or five seats in November. So the redistricting in Texas leads to counter redistricting efforts in California and in Virginia, and they're going to get three seats in Texas and they're going to lose 10 or 11 between California and Virginia. And I just think it's another mark of the fact that while you can have somebody who is a genius at getting himself elected, his own instincts and the way he leads his party can lead them to disaster and potential ruin. Well, there's a Florida – Florida is going to join the fight, right? Ron DeSantis is going to try to save the redistricting wars. But also – But Florida has got a real problem. Florida actually has an anti-gerrimandering law that if the gerrymander, if the mid-districting gerrymander goes through, it will almost certainly be overturned by a court. That was my next point, which is that one of the things that they're not looking at here at the big picture is the fact that Trump and the Republicans have initiated a process in which the control of the House is going to end up being decided by state courts. All of these are going to be challenged. Some of them are going to go through. Some of them are not going to go through. I don't know if the Virginia thing is going to go through, but part of what makes the Virginia thing more likely to stand, I guess, is that it's temporary, that they passed an amendment that temporarily allows the non-partisan commission to do it. And then in five years it goes back – or four years it goes back to every ten years the nonpartisan commission does it. It's not a permanent reshaping of that, but it is – but it also in its own way kind of admits that it's not really the right policy, but it's a constitutional – whatever it is. This stuff – like how far into this have Trump and his attorneys and the people who wanted this war – how far have they looked into this? It doesn't seem like this seems more like the Iran war that the media describes is happening and less like, right? Like this seems like the one that Trump went into with a head of steam and without real preparation because in the end, they're going to have to rely on what state courts say on which ones will hold and which ones won't. And if they all hold, Republicans will end up coming out ahead. That has to include Florida, but they're obviously not all going to hold, and this was an element of the fight that the Democrats didn't prepare for and Republicans didn't. They're closer to a draw from what I understand because didn't Colorado do some redistricting? I mean they're at kind of a draw, which Florida could take them a few votes ahead. Utah lost the – there's a redistricting thing in Utah that will end up giving the Democrats somehow a seat, and so that helps the Democrats. The thing that's also that we should note here, though, is that, I mean, both sides absolutely draped in hypocrisy with regard to any arguments about gerrymandering. So we just should acknowledge that. And also, voters don't really necessarily like this way of doing politics. And you saw a lot of confusion among Virginia voters, a lot of what is going on? Why is a district that used to be here now the constituency is traveling? The representative would live hours away from where most of the constituents live. people don't tend to like this blatant power grab that's done by both sides. So I would say we should factor in, in addition to the likely court challenges that Seth mentioned, the idea that this is going to disgust voters of both parties. This is just not a good way of doing politics, and both sides are now heavily invested in moral grandstanding about gerrymandering that no one believes. Look, I mean, it already has had this corrosive effect. And I can tell you because I can see it working in the way that political professionals, very people, very involved in politics, pundits and all of that are reacting to all of this. So if you really want to go back in time, you have two classic post-census map drawings, one in a state with a Republican-dominated legislature and one in a state with a Democratic-dominated legislature. One is North Carolina and the other is New York. And these redrawings were grotesque. And courts said no, particularly in New York. When you read people expressing outrage about how the Democrats in Virginia let this happen and did this, and it's so outrageous that they did this, and then they say, well, they started it because the New York gerrymander was so insanely outrageous that it had to be – It had to be basically – the 2022 election was totally reshaped by the fact that a court said, no, you are violating every rule known to man in the way you designed these. We're going back to the original map. Then you can do it again after the election, but you've already done something that is just not acceptable. Or was that 24? I don't remember which year the effect happened. that's conventional gerrymandering. That's end of the decade, you have the census, you get the count, and then the politicians play their games and draw a map, and then you take it to court if you think it's unfair. That is not the story in Texas, California, and Virginia, or Florida. This was, we're going to do it anyway. We don't have a census. We don't have new data. We don't have the Constitution saying you need to redraw the districts every 10 years based on the census. We're just doing it as a power move. And the Texas people went to the voters and said, we're doing this as a power move because look at the horrible thing that they did in New York. These Democrats, they can't be trusted. They're antinomian. They'll do anything. so you know what? We should do anything. And then the Democrats in California and in Virginia are like, look at these Republicans. They're doing mid-decade redistricting. They'll do anything. They'll be antinomian. So we can't unilaterally disarm. And you know what? What's interesting is California is twice the size of Texas. So when it passes a redistricting measure, it's going to be better except for their own lunatic jungle primary system it's going to be better for them than it's going to be for Texas if Texas hadn't started this ball rolling California wouldn't have happened Gavin Newsom wouldn't be sitting around buying a million copies of his own book to get money so that he can run for president in 2028 and Abigail Spamberger who said during her campaign that she would not do this, did it anyway. Because both parties seem to think that when they do something, it's kosher, and when the other party does something, it's treif, and they're both treif. And every voter, every honest person knows they're both treif, that this is illegitimate behavior, it's antinomian behavior, it's sheer power politics, and the Republicans have gotten their hats handed to them, in my opinion, and the only way that we're ever going to get back to normalcy in this country and the way politics works is for people to have terrible unintended consequences happen to them so that they get scared when they get a fun, inventive, clever idea designed by some incredibly corrupt political consultant who can also make $100 million getting the state to do what it wants and then spending all this money on it, when they say, you know what? Better leave well enough alone because we have no idea how this is going to turn out. There's a reason that things have been done this way forever. We're going to continue doing it this way because you people are crazy and you make us crazy and then we do crazy things. It's a political version of gain-of-function research. There you go. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I just wonder, though, when Christine talks rightly about how it disgusts voters and it should discuss voters and it disgusts me, especially when you see the shapes, the maps, and these grotesque distortions that they impose on these districts. but I do wonder we talk a lot around election time about low information voters is this something that low information voters are on top of or it kind of goes past them Look according to Patrick Graffini the vote yesterday was the most rightward vote in Virginia over the past four election cycles. That in fact, Republicans made their case to voters that this was illegitimate. And so the vote that has been going leftward shifted rightward, just not enough. I think they won by three points or something like that. And as Chris started, so yesterday afternoon, when vote tallies were coming in like, you know, by the hour over how many people had voted, and Democratic partisans, vote counting Democratic partisans were getting panicked. because it looked like the northern Virginia counties of Fairfax and Loudoun and Arlington weren't coming in the way that they had hoped, but there was a flood of voting in the southern counties that, uh-oh, we're going to lose. And I was texting with Chris Steyerwalt, and he said, ah, you know, but the Democrats got that ocean of early vote out of Fairfax and Loudoun, and they're going to end up winning because the early vote is going to dominate, or is going to be enough. And he got it exactly right, which is not surprising because he's right about everything. But what that tells you is that this was not a low information result, that in fact it was high information. Democrats in the northern counties understood what was at stake here and that they could get four seats for the Democrats and thus ensure a Democratic victory in November. And Republican voters turned out in droves to try to stop this from happening. But there are just more Democratic voters in Virginia than there are Republican voters, and the shift didn't get them over the hump. So the Democratic I just would add the Democratic messaging here was savvy in that they said Trump's trying to take ruin midterm elections, like basically play unfairly in midterm elections. And if we don't do this, he'll do the same thing here in Virginia. That's a pretty powerful and persuasive message. Exactly. And it's exactly what it's so low. Yeah. And it's exactly what Newsom said in 20 in the in the referendum in California. We have to do this. He is stealing our democracy away. He will change all the rules, and we can't let him benefit from his antinomian refusal to accept that there are rules in American politics. So we're going to break the rules in order to maintain the rules. Well, and that's where I don't think the challenge is the low information voter, as Abe was asking about. It's that American voters have no political memory. Rather than seeing this as just a cynical ploy by the Democrats in the way that it was for the Republicans, it was like, oh, we have to defend this thing that's under attack versus cynical gerrymandering. American politics, you know the – now I'm going to use an insane analogy, right? the Bartholomew Cubbins book by Dr. Seuss. So if you remember Bartholomew and the Oobleck, so every time there's this group of magicians that the king has that keep doing these crazy things, and Bartholomew is like, you really shouldn't let them, you should be careful about them, but there they are and they do these crazy things. both parties have these clever, intellectual, perverse gamesmen who are like gamers with politics. And they come up with all kinds of clever, interesting ideas that are really exciting to them. And it turns out that politicians and parties these days are uniquely, uniquely in American history, interested in playing. As I say, usually it's like we know what the rules are, we're following the rules, we have our system of dealing with the rules. So everything you can think of from, in my view, the birthright citizenship game that Republicans are playing that the court is about to decide, that whole idea, oh, you know what? There's a phrase and it isn't really, you know, and here I'm going to come up with my lengthy Talmudic explanation why 160 years of tradition accepting that birthright citizenship is a real thing, that doesn't really count. We're just going to get rid of it. Because I'm so, look here, and I wrote this paper and the Humphreys executor said this, and Bates versus the state of Flamidia said that in 1883, And so I'm going to use this phrase and that piece of – and overturn everything because I don't like birthright citizenship because liberals want too many Spanish speakers to become citizens in the United States. And the Republican Party is completely seized with the excitement of the idea that they can end birthright citizenship. And Democrats similarly get all excited about all kinds of fun ideas that push their buttons, like the gerrymander in New York State, which anyone rational could have told them they should not attempt. because they thought they could do it because they thought the court, the court in New York that was going to rule, was on their side and was wired. And then they presented this court with something where the court couldn't even come up with a rational way of defending what they had done. So they screwed the court by bringing this case to them that the court would otherwise have been happy to approve a gerrymander that was like, you know, pretty favorable to Democrats, but wasn't like 30 out of 31 congressional seats go to the Democrats under this map, or whatever it was. And they said, no, you can't have that. I'm sorry. And part of this is these consultants and these people playing around with American politics and politicians and the people who do this day in and day out, should do politics. Like, stop with the bullshit. Go out, convince voters, you know, canvas, rally, you know, neighborhood organizing, all of that, and get votes the way you're supposed to get votes, and run the country the way the country is supposed to be run, and stop trying to trick the system into being something more like the way you would want it, because it is nauseating and it is cynicism-inducing, and we have this problem with civic culture in the United States, and when we say things like, Christine, you are very much inclined to say we need to reestablish faith and trust in our institutions, or we're sunk. But if our institutions behave this way, people aren't wrong to distrust them. They're right to distrust them. So to gain trust, as I say, at the very least, some of these defeats may have the classic effect of if you ride a motorcycle and you don't wear a helmet and you crash and you crack your skull and you have to spend six months rehabilitating yourself, you're probably going to wear a helmet after that craziness or something like that. It's like stop playing games with our civic culture. But the thing is that they keep changing the games. That's the other thing you noted, right? Like, okay, after one election, we're going to have a debate over the electoral college. The electoral college has to go. It's a white supremacist relic from a blah, blah, blah. And then next time the Republicans go, well, we got to do – we got to change the redistricting. The redistricting norms are unfair to us, so we're going to change the redistricting norms and we're going to do this. And then the Democrats – like it's not just that thing that you fight over. It's that we've now had like three different schemes during – just during the Trump era, not all from Trump, but three different schemes during the Trump era where we've had public debates over. changing the way these votes are taken precisely because someone thinks the existing system is unfair. And so it's not going to be redistricting next time, but there's going to be a different thing. And people aren't going to be as – voters won't readily connect it necessarily to the redistricting thing just as they won't necessarily connect the redistricting thing to abolish the electoral college. Okay. Well, last point here. is that speaking to the lack of historical knowledge stuff, right, 1937, Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court because he was unhappy with the way that it was ruled. The nine justices then sitting were ruling on his, you know, extraordinarily, unflagrantly, unconstitutional legislative efforts. And the court packing, you know, was a miserable, embarrassing failure, the effort to pack the court. and nobody and it was used people studied it as an example of overreach of political overreach by an overconfident president and a problem with this you know second terms and presidents and their arrogance and second terms and all that kind of stuff and that was like axiomatic to anybody who knew about american politics for 60 70 years and now because people didn't like Dobbs or didn't like, you know, Kavanaugh or Gorsuch. There's James Carville sitting there drunk on his ass on every podcast, screaming about how Democrats need to, you know, win in 2028 and then abolish the Electoral College and pack the court and screw the Republicans. Don't forget, make D.C. and Puerto Rico states. That's also in the list. Yes, that was the third one. That was the one of the three. I almost had a Rick Perry moment. Right. So my point is like everybody in politics knew don't pack the – like once burned, twice shy. He won 46 out of the 48 states in 1936 and had his hat handed to him just nine months later in 1937. He was as powerful a president as we had ever seen. And he had his hat handed to him because he went too far. And it's the example that if you study political science, you learn about how when presidencies go too far. But it's now, you know, what is it? It's 90 years later and like, you know, let's pack the court. And this stuff that we're talking about shows why you don't want to start fiddling with the contours of the basis of the United States over 250 years. Had nine Supreme Court justices since the Constitution was written, and we still have nine justices. And, you know, you screw with that, and there's nothing you won't screw with. There's nothing about the American system that you won't think that you can screw with. So that's my thing. And Christine, you have a recommendation. Yes. And actually, it's a palate cleanser because it is a history book, and it's before the age of gerrymandering because it's when our country was much smaller. The subtitle of this book is A New History of Lewis and Clark. The title is The Vast Enterprise by Craig Fairman, F-E-H-R-M-A-N. and for those of you who've read other, as I have, histories of the Lewis and Clark expedition, you might think you know it all, but one thing I liked about this book, I'm only about three quarters of the way through and usually I won't recommend a book until I finish it, but I think I can very handily recommend this one, is that he uses both a different framing for telling the story and he draws out and almost, with wonderful writing, the visceral physical experience of being on this expedition. So he has chapters sort of from the perspective of the major players on the expedition, obviously Lewis and Clark, but also Sacagawea, York, who was an enslaved man who was brought along on the journey, some of the Native American leaders who interacted with the Discovery Corps of Discovery. And it's just it it's a wonderful book because it gives you different perspectives without sort of beating you over the head about why you must see everyone's point of view from the core of discovery. But again, I come back to this really compelling way in which he makes you feel the just the physically grueling challenge of what these men and women went through to discover these new things. And it was just, you get an insight into sort of the emotional lives of certainly of Lewis and Clark, who left this extensive journal. He follows up on what happened to a lot of the members of the Corps of Discovery after the expedition was over. It's just for those of you who love a sort of great narrative portrait of American history and really of a kind of grand achievement in American history. but an achievement that happened because a lot of just regular people came together and decided to do this with the backing of the government. It reminded me in a weird way of the Artemis mission in the sense of like all these people with certain skills, different skills, came together and accomplished this. It's just wonderful if you like that kind of history book, which I do. So it's called The Vast Enterprise, A New History of Lewis and Clark. I think it just came out this week. Craig Fairman, F-E-H-R-M-A-N. Highly recommend. Boy, that sounds great. So great. I mean, just the thought of that, the thought of that, the comparison to space exploration that, you know, these people set off going across a continent that was not undiscovered, but literally where there was no path. So you come up to it and suddenly, yeah, and suddenly you walk up and then suddenly there's a gorge that's 2,000 feet deep. How are you going to, can you survive going down and then up the gorge? Animals, wild animals, whatever. I mean, it's just beyond. There's a gruesome wolf biting incident. I'll just warn you up front. I mean, it's just beyond, you know, you can't, you know, the quality of those kinds of adventurings, you know, the only thing that can possibly compare really is going into space. So amazing. I'm looking forward to that. Okay, so until tomorrow. I've always liked, by the way, how the land surveyor is really the most dangerous and brave job in history, and it sounds like the most boring. It's like, what do you do? I'm a land surveyor. People should respond to that as if you just said that you're a pirate on the high seas or whatever, something like that. It's like, oh, yawn, I'm just a land surveyor, when really it means you fight bears and wolves to cut a path through a mountain. I mean, there's no relation to this, but I remember, you know, Commentary did one cruise when magazines were doing cruises, and we did a cruise. We did an Alaska cruise. and on this cruise people who do cruises in Alaska you stop in Skagway which is one of the towns on the Bay of Laodicea and you get out and there is this railway which takes three hours and you go up this railway path and you go across this gorge and then you come and you go back and it was built in the late 19th century so 100 years after Lewis and Clark and you're on it And then it suddenly is you're seized with this fact that people built this thing in the 1890s, like they in Alaska over the course of several years. So they like first they have to get up the side of the mountain. Laying railroad track and then they have to build this bridge over this gorge and the gorge. You look down and it's like could be 50,000 feet down for all you can tell. And you look at it and you're like, how did anybody do that? How was this even doable? How did this happen? Where did they cut the wood? Where were they living? You know, it's like this movie Train Dreams now on Netflix, which tells a sort of similar story about the making of a train line in the Pacific Northwest. in the 1920s. But it's sort of like this, we, again, we take for granted things that are, you know, we have no business taking for granted. We're like, we are literally standing on the shoulders of, you know, not giants, but men who just did the most astounding things to learn how to make our civilization function and become modern and become what it has since become. Also, antibiotics. If you read these books, you'll be so grateful for antibiotics. I'm just putting that out there. Anyway, so the name of the book again, Christine? This Vast Enterprise, A New History of Lewis and Clark. Okay. So for Abe, Seth, and Christine, I'm John Potthorz. Keep the count on. you