Episode 883: Do We Have a Deal?

It's peace in our time in Iran and the UFC spectacle at the White House. We'll discuss all this and more. On this edition of the editors, I'm Rich Lowry, and I'm joined, as always by the right, Honorable Charles C.W. Cook, the good neighbor at all right, and the notorious M. B.D. Michael Brendan Doherty, you are, of course, listening to a National View podcast. Our sponsors this episode are made in and very much about both of them in due course. If for some reason you're not already following us on a streaming service, by the way, can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts. And if you like what you hear here, please consider giving us a

glowing five-star review wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you don't like what you hear here, please forget. I said anything. So MBD, we have a deal to end the war. We have a We don't know exactly what it is. The administration is hiding the ball so far on this memorandum of understanding could be a little better than we expect. Could be a little worse, but not great from most people's perspectives. I have to say a lot of my hawkish friends are shocked and outraged. I don't quite get that because it was always clear to me.

We were heading to a disappointing outcome here. The basic problem is that we didn't win the war. so not sure why anyone would think the peace would be great. And once they took the straight and it became clear that we wouldn't or couldn't take it back, we were going to have to bargain for the straight, control of the straight again, which seems like what's happened here. And I just returned to one of my themes, wartime governments sometimes just frankly lie to their own people. Obviously, there's been a lot of that throughout human history.

But they also deceive themselves. So you need to have a big BS detector. time Pete Hegseth was out there doing one of these briefings, we're ahead of schedule, we suck the Iranian Navy, we've hit some of these targets. It wasn't that it wasn't true. It just wasn't really relevant to the strategic outcome here. And this was a limited war. If it had been a total war of national survival against Iran, obviously we would have won it. But the problem with limited wars, you need to calibrate the escalation dynamic accordingly. And I don't think we did that.

You know, we kill the Ayatoll at the outset and say the Iranian people are going to rise up. And this is going to be the end of the Iranian regime, which signals to the Iranians. Obviously, it's an existential fight. And they go after the straight and there weren't proper preparations made for that eventuality, a failure that goes directly to the top to Donald Trump. So I think one counterfactual, you go short of regime change at the outset and signal to them, say to them explicitly, you're not after regime change. unless they close the straight.

And then Katie bar the door and maybe you stop them from closing the straight. Or you can go, you know, the opposite direction and say it was too limited. We should have kept regime change as a goal. We should have had a ground component, Kurds or some other force. We should have gone after the infrastructure, kept targeting the Besheed militia, as the Israelis did it at one point. But regardless, this war was Goldilocks in the worst way and we're now paying the price. Well, I mean, you're going to leave anything on the table?

I agree. I was shocked and scandalized when the war was launched at 3 a.m. in the morning on a Saturday. You know, with an announcement by President Donald Trump in his white MAGA cap. You never leave out the white MAGA hat. Yeah.

Traditionalist. I'm a traditionalist on this one. They're red. Bringing the white MAGA cap and, you know, not really explaining why it was in the United States interests to start taking on these risks and expending these munitions.

And, you know, again, I think he, I think the administration bought into a story that the Iranian regime was about to collapse, that American power was just so demonstrative in Colombia that we could quickly accomplish what we need without a huge cost. And, you know, and that Venezuela, Colombia might be later. sorry, that we you know,

that we would quickly accomplish our goals and if we didn't, there would be very little downside to not accomplishing them. And what we found out was we pushed the Iranians to try out their version of an economic nuclear weapon, which is the Strait of Formoose. And unlike an Iranian nuclear weapon,

this is one that they actually had and could exercise, and they did. And immediately, the whole valence shifted the other way with the world looking at the United States saying, okay, when is this going to end? Because this is costing, you know, cooking oil shortages in Southeast Asia and absolute insane energy inflation in parts of Europe.

And I guess this is the plan to get out. And, you know, I think for a lot of people, I think a lot of advocates for this action thought that once Trump could get stuck in, he would inevitably come to their priors, which is that the Iranian regime itself is irreformable. and you can't deal with anyone in it. Honestly, it has to be replaced. And that is just not what the president is willing to do. And I don't think the public has been behind him in these efforts either. I mean, we've seen independence sour on it. Democrats hate it.

And over time, it's become less popular among Republicans. It's kind of funny on the regime change, right? because on the one hand, he'll say the regime has changed. And the other hand, he'll say, oh, I never favored regime change. It's like both at the same time. Yeah, I mean, listen, it does have different kind of valances with, like, regime change in one register is like, well, did we change the leadership? And then on the other side, it's like, well, we, we shuffled it in there. But also, regime change means, like, did we go in and actually dismantle the entire government and replace it with some?

something entirely new. And it's just, we're nowhere near that. And, you know, I, I will say, though, the administration has left itself open to tons of criticism, you know, like, you know, they encourage the Iranian people to rise up and then to so quickly strike a deal and to, well, and to so, and to do it with such open relish and frankly like telegraphed neediness for a deal. I'm sure that's that is a betrayal to Iranian freedom fighters. But again, I think he committed us to an outcome that was not easily achievable

without the full commitment of the American people to expend real blood and treasure and take real risks. Noah?

I do tend to agree with Michael's assessment here that the administration obviously didn't commit the, not just resources, but a commitment of will and gumption to this fight. Our national humiliation was not inevitable. It's not a fact of nature. In fact, it was a failure that was advocated on some quarters. They should be celebrating our humiliation. JD Vance is all but buoyant today, so good on him for consistency. We haven't seen the MOU. I suppose they suggest that they think that'll make us more pliant,

that we'd be willing to suspend belief. But whatever, the versions that are being floated around there are all being bandied about by people who are hostile to this deal, which is, you know, some of us should, you know,

we'll step back and not render too many assessments of what's in there before we see it. But I don't know if we'll ever see it. Before Friday, they say, the president says after Friday, maybe when it's signed an exact. executed, maybe he'll give it to Congress for review, which I'll believe when I see.

But the stuff that they're defending, the administration is defending, or declining to deny, is stuff that we should probably assume is in there. And it's not great. There's definitely unfrozen assets in this deal. The U.S. apparently, according to reporting, supported a plan that was backed by Qatar in which Qatar dispersed billions of pre-war, pre-deal rather sweeteners to the Iranians, which the Iranians will use to rebuild their terrorist apparatus and their military. We abandoned the leverage that was represented by Iran's efforts to go to the mattresses for Hezbollah.

They needed that more than we needed it. Now we're putting pressure on Israel. And when Israel is attacked by Hezbollah and subsequently responds, Israel gets to be the bad guy. This is how it always works. They'll be engaging in defensive actions that are in America's interests as well, because their enemies are our enemies. But Israel will be the obstacle to peace. This apparently doesn't even secure a no-toll regime on the straight. The whole point of this exercise, I thought, was to just open the street.

in the absence of the use of force to open it as we have previously. JD Vance says, well, our expectations are that the straight is going to be opened in a toll-free way for the long term. The whole parade of horribles that will follow that precedent if it's allowed to persist, and we don't know if it's going to be allowed to persist, are pretty undesirable. Indeed, the vice president has been really unconvincing the entire time. He said yesterday on Fox News that the coolest thing about the progress that we've made over the last few weeks is that you're seeing people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even IRA. IRGC officials say, you know what?

We recognize the way that we've done business with the U.S. over the last 47 years is a mistake. Let's try something else. Is this a test? Am I supposed to mouth that Shibboleth in order to prove that I'm on the team? Because there's no other reason to offer that facially implausible suggestion of a shifting political reality on the ground in Iran. This regime is committed to war with the United States.

It will forever wage that war as long as it exists. That is a fact that is not alterable by deals or sweeteners or even military pressure, as we've demonstrated over the course of the last two campaigns. The only saving grace, in my view, is that multi-stage deals in this region never progress beyond stage one. Stage one in the Hamas deal was unobjectionable. So that's pretty good. This stage one is super bad. So we go back to talks for 60 days.

there's zero likelihood that Trump will get the terms that he wants when it comes to the Iranian nuclear program, as David Albright and the team of the good ISIS demonstrated. Damage done to Iran's centrifuges, it's fabrication plants, its heavy water, yellow cake production plants, weapons, production sites, etc. is comprehensive. There's very little for Iran to negotiate over. And JD Vance sometimes says this. And when his talks, he says, well, we're talking about them not rebuilding it. And they won't rebuild it because they won't have money unless they engage with the international system.

as a good faith actor and a good member of the international community. It's sort of an unprovable condition here. Either if they don't reengage with the world, then they won't be able to develop their nuclear weapons program. But if they do reengage with the world, they won't want to reengage with their nuclear program. It just doesn't make any sense. I suspect that what we're going to do here is not go back to war within the next 60

days timeframe. Nobody's going to want to go back to high-tempo combat operations in August. The calculation might change. change after the midterm elections. But the risk is that Trump's becomes wedded to this deal because it's his deal. And already the pressure that we're putting on Israel suggests that the president regards this as his baby. And, you know, it undermines the worst part of this, in my view, is it undermines the precedent that was established with Midnight Hammer, which I thought was super valuable. Even post-Trump, no Democrat would want to preside over a nuclear

breakout. So even if they were reluctant to engage in a long mowing operation, as it were, they would do it just because they didn't want to be the guy who presides over a nuclear breakout. But now everyone's going to look at this experience and they're going to say, well, it was just fruitless. Maybe there's nothing that we can do to prevent this apocal development, this incredibly civilizational threatening development. But Trump seems committed to taking success or taking failure from the jaws of success here. And he might succeed in that endeavor. So Charlie, another aspect of this and MBD referred to it is just the total contempt for small D Democratic deliberation, no congressional buy-in at the outset, not even an attempt to make a public case for it at the outset. And here we are. We got this

MOU that we're debating about, but we can't see. We can't see it. Eventually, I assume we'll see it right when they sign it or after they sign it on Friday, probably after. And then we'll see what congressional buy-in they attempted to get in, if any. But this played a huge element and how this turned out that the public wasn't on board. And in part, maybe they wouldn't have been able to persuade it, but they didn't even try. Well, that was the original sin. And much of what has happened has followed from that original sin. Usually, the process is that the government consults

the public either directly or indirectly there's a debate in Congress and after that once the material question has been answered

that being should we be at war with Germany then you get the fog necessarily war is not supposed to be as transparent in its execution as quotidian government domestically. So you wouldn't expect an American administration to share every operational detail with the public.

And you wouldn't expect the details of a peace deal to be made a public. while it was being debated. What's been so weird about this one is that, as you say, the Trump administration right from the beginning skipped the consultation. But it has been effusive in its communication with the public. It constantly tells us what it's thinking, what it's trying to do, even if that's contradictory. It has said over and over again, there is a deal, there isn't a deal,

we're going back, we're going to destroy them, we're not going to destroy them. We're going to annihilate them. Ah, they just shot down one helicopter. It's schizophrenic, but it's publicly so. And now we have a deal that we can't read, but it's not rumors of a deal. It's not a New York Times report

that there might be a deal. It's a deal that's being discussed by the, administration on television, but we can't read it. And that is really unusual. I think it's a big problem for reasons I've argued for years, but that is really unusual. Unfortunately, it is indicative of the problem with this whole endeavor, which is that at no point has it been clear to voters what is going on or why? And so they're sifting through the consequences. Now, I think if you step back and you look at this analytically, it is possible that the United States is in a better position vis-à-vis Iran, despite the problems that we've just outlined than it was before.

Even if we ended up with the Obama deal, in effect, the fact that we bombed them and set their program back a good amount of time makes us Obama deal plus, not merely Obama deal revisited. But that case is so hard to make because Trump has, as he often does, overpromised, been bombastic and expected everyone to fall in line. I don't think that this was necessarily solely a reference to what's going on in Iran. But the White House recently has started putting out these really strange tweets where they say, just trust in the president. It will work out.

It always does. No. That's not how American democracy works. And it's not how it's going to work here. So the best case that Trump's going to be able to persuade the public of, not make he'll try anything, is, look, I essentially restore. called the status quo ante, but with an add-on of a messed-up Iranian nuclear program. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad outcome, but goodness me, this could have been

handled better. All right, so MBD, exit questions to you first. We're multi-barreling it. I don't think you were on this episode, but we did this prematurely, as it turned out, when there was the first ceasefire. So we're doing it a little prematurely here, but hey, what the heck, no one really remembers what we say here anyway. So let's go winners and losers and starting with JD Vance. Winner or loser? A winner in the sense that I think the end of conflict is good for the administration and for him

and the opening of the street. If it happens, it's good. You know, you want to start seeing gas prices go down before we get to August and September. That's when a lot of voters decide how they feel about the direction of the economy. And, yeah, I think you're going to see a very swift pivot back to the domestic economy. You're going to see him say, I've solved the straight, and then we're going to maybe see a rate change at the Fed and, you know, declare a party time on Wall Street. So your assumption is a correct one, but just underlining it is that his political fortunes are really roped in with. Trump. So the end of the war and getting gas prices down is good for Trump, therefore it's good for JD. Correct. Noah Rothman. JD Vance, winner or loser? I think it's a little too early to say, but I do think it's a poison chalice that a lot of people are handing him in this

administration on background to Axios and Lindsey Graham on record saying, this is his deal. You know, good for him. Let's see him go out there and make this thing a reality. He'll have to argue against Donald Trump's policy, the war, and advocate this Obama-style capitulation. that it's easy to get to his right on. I supported Trump even harder. He was betrayed at the negotiating table, et cetera, et cetera. So I think he ends up being a loser in the long run. Charlie?

I think he's a loser. That doesn't mean he will lose, but I think he is a loser in this scenario because he was part of an administration that did this. And the sort of people who oppose that are going to be disillusioned by that. And it's quite difficult for him to break away from it. In the eyes of those who are steadfast critics of American foreign policy, the Trump administration was good, in part because it hadn't done this. And therefore, it became one of the few administrations in

recent years that hadn't. But that's no longer true. And I don't know how JD Vance, even if he privately is upset by this, can extricate himself from that fact. I'm going to say neutral. I just don't get the attempt to blame JD Vance for this deal when it was the President of the United States who desperately wanted it. It's not as though Trump wanted to keep going on the war and then J.D. intervened and cut a peace deal on the side that Trump's been forced to accept, you know, the way Benjamin Netanyahu is going to be forced to accept this deal. So I think he showed as much separation as he possibly could, you know, through the leaks about these meetings, which I assume are accurate, that he was actually the only one who spoke up and said, sir. I don't think you should do this. At the same time, he's been a team player and stayed, as far as we can tell,

on the right side of Donald Trump, which is a key imperative. So I'm going neutral with JD Vance, to you first know on this one, Marco Rubio, a winner or loser? Verdict is out on this one, and it could go either way. His legacy is now going to be very much tethered to Donald Trump's foreign policy, and it's just far too early to evaluate how this Iran outcry. come, which I don't think is a stable status quo. And I'd be shocked if Iran doesn't feature prominently over the course of Donald Trump's next two and a half years. But we just don't know how that

pans out within the context of the reordering of the entire Middle East over which Donald Trump has presided throughout his president's sees. So that one is just too hard for me to gauge from our vantage. Charlie, Marco. Well, I don't think that this is good for Marco because I think that he has a reputation as an interventionist. And if this is unpopular as it seems to be, I think that will be laid at his feet. The only caveat I have is I do think the Secretary of State fairly or not has a degree of separation that the vice president doesn't.

But I wouldn't say this is good for Marco. So what do you mean a degree of separation? Well, from the president. From the president. I mean, this is an imperfect analogy, but Churchill became prime minister in 1940 in part because of the failure of an operation that he'd been heavily involved in. But because he wasn't the prime minister, people see it differently. So I wonder if it will be less of a problem for him politically. But I think this is a hit on his worldview, at least in so far as, I mean, you'd make the argument, wouldn't you, say, well, yeah, but if Marco Rubio had been in charge of it, it would have been much better.

Maybe that's true. But still, it is clear that he lobbied for this, and it hasn't turned out well. And again, fairly or not, I don't think that helps him. MBD. Marco. I'm not sure if Marco Rubio lobbied for it. I mean, some of the reporting in the New York Times suggested he had a lot of skepticism at the start, even though he was the spokesman for it, you know, in the press,

the way J.D. has become the spokesman in the last, you know, 36 hours. I think what Charlie says really, I just want to comment on one thing Charlie said about the closest issue. It's an interesting reversal in American history where it used to be that the vice president was sort of the sullen separate person from the president. And the secretary of state was really like the second in command of the administration. And it's sort of like the prime person to succeed the president someday. That's kind of an interesting quirk of how we view these things now, you know, where the vice president is part of the ticket. I think Marco has won in the sense that just maybe it was out of boredom, maybe it was out of ideological, you know, spats had been going on throughout this administration, but it's obvious his stock has rose in the

betting markets and so on in the last six months. So yeah, I think he's, you have to say, say he's a winner. So I'm going to say, I agree that the more you see it, Marco, kind of the better it is for him, because he's become such an able performer. I can still go slight loser. I don't want to exaggerate it, but I'd put my thumb on the loser part of the scale side of the scale, just because I don't think it's going to be a venture that's remembered fondly, and he was very associated with it.

And even if he was cool to this at the outset, which is what the insider reporting suggests, it is kind of expression of a worldview that he's associated with. Charlie, B.Benjamin Netanyahu, winner or loser? I think winner. The domestic American fallout isn't particularly relevant to him. And along with the United States, he set back Iran's. nuclear program, which is his primary aim? MBD. He's a winner for the reasons Charlie said.

You know, you might... Yeah, I think that when outweighs, there is one side on the law sledgeer, which is, you know, Donald Trump has now definitively broken a taboo of Republican presidents being critical of the Israeli prime minister in a way that was just unthinkable before and was only associated maybe with how people thought Obama thought about them.

So, yeah, that's on the law side, but I think Israel's success in the region has been pretty insane during the Trump years. No. B.B. is personally a loser. He tethered his political fortunes to the president in a way that was his only political saving grace domestically in Israel. Israelis would give Trump credit for successes that BB engineered just to avoid giving him credit for those successes. And beyond that, the Israeli condition in the United States is mournful. We now have the president, who was his only saving grace, essentially is saying that Israel is the barricade and the obstacle between us and peace.

and he has no friends on the Democratic side. They regard Israel as the singular force of evil on the planet Earth next to the United States. So BB's calculations have backfired on. Yeah, I'm going to say stone cold loser. I don't know what I think about Israeli politics, but certainly the way this is ending increases the odds that he'll lose and perhaps go to jail. He started, you know, totally inside the charm circle, and now he's totally outside it.

So I think he is a loser with that. Let's hear from our first sponsor this episode, Made In. If you're considering the pros and cons of different cookware brands, you should know that Maiden has more the pros. Pros like Tom Filcio, Brooke Williamson, and many other professional chefs who all trust their cooking to Maiden cookware. Fact is, Maiden has a long-standing relationship with professional chefs. The company evolved from a hundred-year-old kitchen supply business

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live, but the imagery is quite kind of heart-poundingly patriotic, but all things considered, I don't think it should have happened. How about you? Oh, I don't think it should have happened, but I'm not particularly upset about it. It's not entirely alien to American history. It's quite Teddy Roosevelt. It's quite Andrew Jackson. And those presidents have some things in common with Trump, or rather I should say Trump has some things in common with them.

So the notion that this is a historical aberration and desecration. of the White House isn't quite right. I don't elevate the White House to the same cesaro papist level, or from George Will, that others do. So this is for me a double-edged sword in that I'm not crying about it because it violated the sanctity of the presidency.

But equally, if I had my way, this would be a long way from what the president did because the president would not be a national celebrity. The president would be a boring man who executed laws passed by Congress. But of all the things to get head up about in our era of imperial presidencies, this is very low down my list.

What I care about is the exercise of power. I care that Congress has been diminished to the point at which we just on this podcast had a segment about a war that was waged entirely without reference to the legislature. And I think that those who have spent the last 36 hours clutching their pearls over this and becoming so overjoyed at Trump's name coming off the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center as Jim Acosta. did that he compared it to the fall of the Berlin Wall and said that it shows what humanity can do in the face of tyranny need to understand that they are devoting their energies to the minutiae and not the bigger picture. I agree, incidentally, that Trump's putting his name on the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center was petty. He shouldn't have happened. It was also illegal. I have some questions about standing in that case, but the statutory analysis was correct.

but these are not what ails America. That was not indicative of anything really other than the eccentricity of the current occupant of the White House. So I don't like it, but I have spent some total of about two minutes thinking about it other than to note that the production values

were pretty high. It didn't fail. It just shouldn't be what we're doing with our government. So, I mean, if someone posted on social media, how Roman this was, because you get peace with Persia in the early afternoon, and then you get the gladiatorial combat. Yeah, it was, I mean, the aesthetics of the event were, like, kind of populism on the extreme.

And I say that both is a virtue and a criticism, you know, it's, it's, I'm sure it was repulsive to a lot of people. And even, you know, Dana White conceded the South Lawn is built for governance, not sport. But you had 85,000 ordinary fans watching for free on the ellipse. You know, that is an extremely Jacksonian kind of. of gesture and image. You know, 4,300 seats went to mostly active military.

You know, ESPN kind of said that UFC at White House perfectly fits the America of today. And that's, you know, that's just something that, I mean, Charlie brought up George Will. So I can't think of something that would, that Will would dislike more, right? Will's vision of sport is baseball, right? This 19th century pastoral game that kind of was translated into American cities in the 20th century, you know, representing both the kind of well-ordered agrarian past and this, you know, charging Hamiltonian future, whereas the UFC is like this pure, um, spectacle and bombast. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's kind of it. I mean, that's, I think that's all there kind of is to say

about it. Um, it's, it does, well, actually, you know, it does occur to me, you know, we, we're mentioning the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center. I actually think it's a shame that the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Center is basically shut down right now for the for the 2050th you know it should be a full program to satisfy the the portion of Americans who want you know orchestral and operatic performance which is you know whether you like it or not it is subsidized by the government um to some degree and and by private philanthropy um joining it. And that's part of us too. And it's a shame that that's not happening.

So by the way, it's a little bit of myth that baseball was a pastoral game. It was really a city game first. The locus of baseball's earliest development was really Brooklyn, well before the Dodgers. But that aside, MBD. It is sort of interesting how Trump is so much a creature of, you know, the 70s and the 80s in so many respects. Yeah. But this is something that's totally cutting-edge sport that he embraced very early on. You know, it used to be that John McCain just hated the ultimate fighting, right?

He wanted to ban it and thought it was so unsportsman-like compared to traditional boxing. But Trump's been all in on this. And I guess it's a form of, it's a combat sport that combines boxing with a little the WWE style or aesthetic that Trump's obviously been very into for a very long time. Yeah, absolutely. You know, but, you know, and I think that is, for a lot of people, like, you know, we're seeing a lot of people, we talked to in a previous episode about the World Cup Europeans coming to America and like marveling at Buckees or whatever, you know, in these places. You know, this, these images of Bud Lights and the claw and the octagon girls. stars and stripes. That is, you know, the same kind of appeal of, like, you know, Americans are the kind of people that,

yeah, get out on jet skis and play Leonard Skinnerd and do something stupid and physically dangerous. Sunday in Florida. Yeah. I mean, it's just, and, and, you know, we're not ashamed of it. And, and, you know, we're not ashamed of it. Maybe it's just, I do think it's odd because the political class does seem, you know, traditionally to shy away from that aesthetic and from that, um, uh, from that audience.

Uh, but of course that's we're living in the Trump era. So no, uh, something that was breaking this morning, there seems to have been a no kidding, really serious still, you know, early reports. So we'll see how it develops. terror plot to attack this event? So I read the Washington Post account of this, and it was comically vague. It consisted of about like seven to ten paragraphs, two sentence each, describing Kash Patel, FBI director's description of the potential threat, quote unquote, involving multiple

individuals who were stopped cold. Readers were provided with no details about it, merely that the event itself that was targeted, the UFC event, was celebrating Donald Trump's 80th birthday, and it was held by his close friend, UFC CEO Dana White. That was it. There was no little note at the bottom that said this is a developing story. We'll add additional details. Readers could have been forgiven for thinking this wasn't really a big deal. It was a very big deal. As Fox News reported, at least 23 people were allegedly captured in a signal chat, which suggests to me, by the way, that the lack of calm sophistication here in security and should admit that this was not a state-based attack.

And I was confirmed in that impression. The plan was to use explosive-laden drones to strike buildings in the vicinity of the White House during the UFC fight, which would spark a mass evacuation. Amid the chaos, a sniper team would open fire on the fleeing crowd. A second stage would subsequently unfold in which assailants would storm the White House. There's a lot of aspirations involved here. It was very high aspirationally and probably not that sophisticated. Nevertheless, they had rested at least five plotters of the 23 who were on this signal chat,

one of whom provided some clues about their motives, as the New York Post summarized, quote, a suspect told investigators the goal of this attack was to target, quote, capitalist elites, quote, billionaires, and politicians who receive money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, A-PAC. Who do you think was behind this one, guys? We really have to engage in a lot of speculation to determine that this was obviously a far-left attack on the president and the White House in pursuit of political objectives. It was far-left political violence, which is in my wheelhouse. It looked a lot to me like the plot that unfolded ahead of New Year's Eve in 2025 in which a self-styled liberation front planned to detonate improvised explosive devices

at five sites in Los Angeles. The organization's motives were pretty clear, too, quote, freeing the world from American imperialism is the only way to a safe and peaceful future. And it looks a lot like the July 4th, 2025 attack on an ice facility in Texas, in which an Antifa mob used some pretty sophisticated ambush tax. used fireworks to lure their targets out of this ice facility and then opened up on them from overlapping fields of fire. And they too, you know, made their motives pretty clear with literature that they left behind fight ice terror with class war, free all political prisoners

and a flag that read, resist fascism, fight oligarchy. If this, and there's just an effort to mute the public's reaction to this. If this had been an obvious right-wing terrorist event, we would have been confronted with it. And we would have been confronted with the landscape that incubates this kind of threats and the potentially fascistic agitators on the right, up to and including the president of the United States, who are lending aid and moral comfort to these movements. And that would be good.

We should be confronted with that sort of thing in the wake of potentially apoccal violence like this. But we're not because it's the left. And because a media apparatus abetted by complacent figures and institutions ranging from academia to politics, do not want to confront this threat. They think it's not a big deal. And if they don't think it's a big deal, they certainly don't want to be implicated by association.

And so we're going to get more attempted assassinations, more bombing plots, more violent mobs that attack and attempt to kill police, which is very similar to how Marxist guerrilla movements of the 60s and 70s operated. It's a really very unnerving development, but we're just not treating it like one and drives me nuts. So Charlie X question to you, hypothetically,

your president of the United States, what appropriate or inappropriate event do you host on the White House salon? Well, people, you know what I'm going to say. People said that that contraption that they held the UFC fight in looked like a roller coaster, and I thought, well, if we now know that it's possible to build something next to the White House

that looks just like a roller coaster, why not do it? So I think that I would open a roller coaster. But in beneficent fashion, I would, of course, allow my adoring public to ride the roller coaster for free throughout the summer. And then probably send it off to some amusement park for safekeeping. MBD, we got a roller coaster on the board. Oh, man.

I don't think you could, I don't think you could. you could physically build it there in the space that you have. But do you remember those kind of Red Bull, like, ice skating, downhill ice skating events that they would do in, like, these hilly cities like Quebec City? I loved those things. They had these two-man... Yeah, a winter event.

These two-man ice skating races that Red Bull used to put on that I just thought were weirdly thrilling and still in that popular spirit, but something a little bit different. Noah. Any big theatrical event like this on the White House lawn is, in my view,

inappropriate. This is just my personal taste, and I understand it's not everybody's taste, but that's just me. But if I had to do something like that, I'd put up a big stage and host a reproduction of my favorite musical, 1776, which is

very in keeping with the themes of the founding and our 250th anniversary. It imparts a few lessons about history as some of that dialogue was taken directly from John Adams' correspondence with his wife Abigail. And it's just a really good show. So if you have to do something like that, make it highbrow. Let's, you know, this is the quintessential American art form. Let's keep it there. So I'd keep stuff going all summer long.

I do an air show. I think the flyover was awesome. Why not just build on that with an air show? Or speaking of Red Bull, do those kind of propeller playing races. I don't know what they're called, but they're very cool. There's one in New York Harbor. One says they're awesome to watch. So do that around Washington, D.C. with the White House as the locus of it.

I'd have softball fields on the lawn so the congressional teams and other recreational leagues could just play softball with an awesome setting of the White House there and do concerts, summer concert series, definitely. Some highbrow, you know, Boston Pops. Let's get Beethoven's 9th performed there. Let's get the Marine Corps band there. And let's get some awesome rock bands there. So look, it's a great space.

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Trump's approval rating actually pretty good compared to some other polls. He was at 42. I think, though, that's a new second term low for the NBC poll. But a very interesting finding with regard to pride in our country. Extreme. Very is relatively low. I think what is it? Like in the 50th somewhere, 56%.

But a major partisan separation with Republicans feeling more proud of their country. Democrats, not so much. What do you make of it? Yeah. So the NBC News headline was America at 2.5. is riven with doubt and pessimism, and it's fueled by this, quote, record low number of respondents who are extremely proud to be Americans. The extremely proud number is one-third.

Another 23% are very proud. So that totals for 56%. A majority of the American people are extremely or very proud to be Americans. Under that, you have only a little proud. That's 11%. And then another 10% said they were not proud at all. So it breaks out to 56% extremely very, not very none, 21%. And as you said, there's a big partisan divide among Republicans, self-described.

90% are extremely very. Among Democrats, it's just south of 30%. And it's even more pronounced by age. 65 and over is 70%, 18 to 34. 36% in the extremely very range. We also had a UGov poll that kind of dovetails with this, which gives us slightly different numbers when it comes to the actual partisan breakdowns among Democrats. It's tight, but 40% describe themselves as proud, either very or somewhat,

and 38% say ashamed, somewhat or vary. But when it comes to self-described liberals, which is a distinct demographic, usually within the democratic universe, it's 30% who are very somewhat proud, and 45% who are somewhat ashamed or very ashamed. And this kind of dovetails with what Gallup has been surveying over the course of the last 15 years. It's an apples to apples comparison because they've been asking this question for a very consistent period of time. And it finds that Democrats have been shedding their enthusiasm for the country, even during Democratic presidential administrations for a very long time.

And that's especially pronounced among the young, whereas Republicans retain a high degree of pride in the country. And even Gen Z Republicans are far more proud of the country than. Gen Z Democrats. And obviously this is really undesirable. For a very long time, Democratic elites have seemed to regard patriotism and the promulgation thereof as unsophisticated, especially if you're catering to the cult of youth,

telling them essentially what they want to know, which is that America is the font from which all evils spring, which is fueled in part by a foreign influence campaign that devotes its energies to promoting anti-American messages on social media. There are some who see political advantages in this, especially on the right, who think that

it reflects poorly on the Democratic Party. I tend to agree with them that they're so ungrateful towards the country of their birth that they would have this outlook towards it. And that's exploitable by presenting the Republican Party as this patriotic, uniquely patriotic vehicle for those sentiments and expressions that they could mute the Democratic Party's appeal and they maybe could, but I fear for the future that that tactic could hold because negative partisanship rules our lives. If the other party is for it, we're against it. And at some point, Democrats will be back in power. And I don't want a Democratic Party in power that has

nothing but contempt for the country and perceives itself to be behold into constituencies who have nothing but contempt for the country and think that it needs to be reimagined and rebuilt from the ground up rather than it's preserved and secured and perhaps even reformed at the margins, but generally appreciated. And that just is not a sentiment that's prominent among Democrats today. And I see the temptation to exploit it. I just hope that that is done in a sophisticated way that doesn't sacrifice our future, because one day Republicans will be out of office and the Democratic Party will have the reins. And Lord knows what they'll do with this country when they have that power. Michelle, you can look at these numbers. And some people in the

the media have said this, well, it's a Trump effect. They feel worse about the country when Donald Trump is in power. But if you look at the series that Gallup has done, I think they've been asking this question since 2001, early in 2001 before the 9-11 attacks. I think it was like 87% extremely are very proud of their country. And Democrats were right up there. I think a tick lower than Republicans, but right up there. And there's pretty much been a separation ever since. but you look at when Obama was president and Biden was president, Democrats were less proud of their country than Republicans were. And I think they're wrong.

I think people who live here and think it's a bad place, or who think that it's a theoretically good place are wrong. Now, I suspect some of this is because the parties have sorted. Some of it's Trump, but as you point out, not most of it. bit. Look, I don't like accusing people who disagree with me politically of hating America. I don't think that's constructive and in many cases I don't think that's true. I do think I like America more than them, though. I really, really like America. Now, perhaps that's part and parcel of being a conservative. I wish to conserve it. I don't

wish to progress away from it. But I look around at this country and while there are problems, problems I'm happy to write about, sometimes do so claustically and in an unhappy tone. I see a place that is a marvel. I see a place that has a remarkable constitution that is filled with friendly and interesting and entrepreneurial and optimistic people that is very, very, very, very, wealthy, that has great infrastructure, by which I don't mean some bridge in Maryland,

that has a get-up-and-go culture at all levels, that is geographically fascinating, it's huge, diverse in the useful sense of that term, not a room full of people who look different who will agree on everything. But that is actually different, culturally, and in its weather and architecture and topography, all around the continent. And I don't look at that and feel a great need to change it. I don't look at that persuaded that just if my guy could get in,

then it would be fine. don't look at that and say, well, it's fine in theory, but not in practice. And I certainly don't look at that with the ingratitude that it would take to say that you weren't proud to be an American, which is an enormous privilege, not just in the world right now, but historically. Now, people sometimes on the right as well get very upset when you say what I'm about to say because they say that it is logically impossible. But if you had been born, at any other point in human history and in any other place, you would be worse off than you are right now.

I know that people are not randomly assigned souls. We're not all floating around and then a baby's born in India and it zaps into that one. I understand that I was destined to be born to English parents. But that's not really the point and that's not really why people say that. what people are saying is be grateful for what you have which you didn't build i am very critical of the idea that in adulthood people are not responsible for their own success or failures i think that that is a cancerous idea and it's one that is unfortunately grown in prominence on the left and is attractive to some parts of the right as well

but you did not do anything to create the world that existed before you. By definition, you didn't. You were born at that point, you start affecting things. But before that, you did nothing. As an immigrant, I did even less. I wasn't born here. I was 26 when I moved to him. And to look at this astonishing oasis that has problems, yes,

but that historically and relatively speaking is an astonishing oasis and say, pa is ingratitude and it's stupidity and myopia and arrogance. And I have absolutely no time for it. And I hope that this trend reverses because bad things happen when people live in a good place but don't like it. So MBD, what do you think accounts for the separation between older people and younger people? Why are younger people less patriotic? I haven't extensively studied the data over time, but just based on anecdotally, in my own experience as a young person, it was cool to be patriotic,

but I guess not so much now. Yeah, I think there's a lot of reasons. You know, one, it's just the habits of it aren't as emphasized in schooling. Or, and they're not backed up by religious practice. America's like increasingly, and especially younger people, are increasingly in the nuns camp, the N-O-N-E-S, having no religion. You know, so, you know, and also I think. the the sociological reality that people face in a kind of low fertility world of like fewer cousins fewer aunts and uncles fewer brothers and sisters all of

this is kind of spiritually related I mean like the book I wrote seven years ago was about this kind of spiritual connection between you know God and country, you know, God family and country. You know, these are kind of three things that together order men's souls. And, you know, a weakness in one, I think, begets weaknesses in others. So, yeah, I think that's the fundamental diagnosis. You know, it's the curriculums teaching people, you know, that our founding was nothing but a mask of white supremacy or whatever.

Those are kind of symptoms of the disease, but I'm not sure that they're a root cause. All right. Next question, do you first know, Rothman, your favorite patriotic ritual? I sort of wish I had more in my life. There aren't very many. But I do appreciate when at, you know, a Little League ball game or just my kids games, the national anthem comes on and everyone stands and the crowd goes silent almost instantly hats come off hands go to your heart and we stand maybe a static a rendition yes it is it is usually

because it's a recording right so it's not like a you know big brass band but yeah and it's it's just a little marker and it takes about two minutes where you spend a 120 seconds worth of silence thinking about how grateful you should be to be in this country and how many sacrificed so that you could enjoy the moment you're enjoying there. So that's what sprang to mind. There you go. Sure. Well, I think that's a pretty good one. And it's not one that we have in Britain, have the national anthem in all manner of circumstances in the United States. There's a barbecue place around the corner from me that plays it at noon.

and everyone stands up, takes off their hat. Amusement parks play it before. Sorry? I hadn't heard that before a restaurant just playing it routinely. That's awesome. Yeah, and amusement parks play it before you're allowed in. I can remember being fascinated by that as a kid

at Knott's Bari Weiss Farm in California when I was about 10 as we showed up at opening time. And they played the national anthem and everyone took off their hat and looked up at the flag. I do think that that is a pretty good, I'm not sure I can beat that. Yeah, we're a very flag-centric society. We have a flag day, and we just mentioned the UFC fight.

The national anthem is all about the flag. People salute the flag. MBD.

Fourth of July is on the board. It's still available on the board. And I love the weird break in the summer to go outside, barbecue, enjoy the fireworks, the kids, you know, love it. It's weirdly, you know, I know fireworks are Chinese in origin, but the way we use them is fully American. Yeah, I think it's hard to beat Noah's, but my selection would be the small town, July 4th parade,

where you get people throwing out candy for the kids, you get old codgers and old cars, you get fire trucks, You get local sports teams, youth teams. I just think it's absolutely wonderful. Whenever I can make one on July 4th, I do with that, it's time to hit a few other things before we go. MBD, you mentioned the rec game championship upcoming last app. It's now been played, but we need to know the outcome.

Yeah, well, the outcome for my son's team was, a 17 to 4 loss. And it was hot and brutal. And it was just two hours of kind of baseball torture. My son's team, you know, was valiant. This is a team they had beaten earlier in the season in a dramatic fashion. But I guess they hadn't forgotten, and they got their revenge. Our catcher got injured halfway through the game in a

collision with the pitcher on a foul ball. Oh, no. And had to be removed, leaving us without a field or short, which meant my son went from center to short with a sideline in shallow center. And I have to say, though, it was awesome watching it. My son, given this responsibility, just stepped up and ran for every to be the cutoff man, when this other team was just bombing them into the outfield, caught every ball, you know, kind of charged in with the ball up,

intimidating the runners back to second base or first base. And, you know, I just couldn't have been, it was weirdest thing. It was like they were getting their butts kicked, but I couldn't have been happier because my kid was out there taking it like a champ. Awesome. So, no, you've taken the first boat trip. of the summer. Yeah, I got the neighbors have boats, which is good because I will never have a boat, but God bless them for doing it. We took it out on the lake, one of our local New Jersey party lakes.

And it just demonstrates to me why lakes are infinitely superior to the shore. The water gets warmer, quicker, there's no sand, and more importantly, there's far more freedom of action on the lake. I'm a native New Jerseyan. I love the shore as much as anybody else. But you are policed there in a way that you just aren't on lakes. There's plenty of police on these lakes. But the American ideal is more represented there. Rugged individualism, respect for property rights, what have you.

The lake is the American ideal. The shore is just sort of there. This is my unpopular opinion for the day. And I'm going to catch some flak from my native New Jersey. My fellow native New Jerseyans. but you know I'm right. So, Charlie, you experienced the first massive thunderstorm down there in North Florida. I did.

Living on the beach, I feel personally attacked. No, I think we're going to have to have words afterwards, but I'll nevertheless. You have legs. You just shouldn't go in them. You will be devoured by large fauna. That is true. There's another choice of living in Florida. As is thunderstorms, but I love thunderstorms.

and we had the first blow your brains out thunderstorm the other day. The sort of way you think, if I didn't have the ability to go inside, what on earth would I do? Just astonishing amounts of water, sky turns completely black, lightning really too close for comfort. The thunder is so loud that you wonder if it is actually bringing down your house and the house shakes. I have probably mentioned thunderstorms in my light item five or six times since we started doing this podcast, but you have to understand for someone from England,

a country where people are obsessed with the weather, but nothing ever happens in the weather, this is tremendously exciting. And Sunday afternoon at about three o'clock, it went from being sunny to the end of the world in eight flat minutes. And I just love it. Yeah, I love thunderstorms too. There's a great description I should send it to you if I haven't already at some point in Huck Finn, but Mark Twain just has a wonderful description of what a thunderstorm is like. So I saw the new Steven Spielberg movie Disclosure Day. It's an alien movie. I have to say I was disappointed in it, didn't really like it. There were only two good scenes in this movie. They were pretty good scenes though. Those the two good ones. I didn't like the way it look. Kind of had this

monochromatic gray look. I didn't like it. like the music. At times there was a very cheesy kind of Hitchcock style music. It tries to make some sort of spiritual point that I don't think is fully, fully realized. And Charlie, it's too long because it's two hours and 20 minutes long. With that, it's time for our editor's picks, MBD. What's your pick? My pick is Ramesh Poneuro's cover for the August 2026 issue, the fights on the right. It's Ramesh surveying a movement that is presently dividing itself between so-called freedom conservatism, conservatives and national conservatives. And Ramesh brings his incredible clarity to the issue and distinguishing between what these groups agree on, where they disagree, where their accesses are taking them as they drift away from each other. And, you know, you don't have to agree with every single one of his judgments to really appreciate the quality of his mind and the, and even more like the kind of equanimity and, and virtue behind it that you can sense in this piece that, you know, this is, you know, this is, a man using his considerable intent.

for the good and for the good of his confrars. No, what's your pick? There was a lot to choose from this time around. I want to put in a good word for Andy McCarthy, who's, it's too hard to pick one. He's just been issuing this unrelenting fuselot of attack on the Iran deal, and each one of them is better than the last. But I wanted to pick our editorial intern, Caitlin Kippert's interview with Moonbase's program

executive Carlos Garcia Galan. I keep waiting for the Artemis program, the wheels to come off of this thing. But they seem to be on track. The Artemis program in its successive stages, the ultimate stage being the development of a permanent static lunar colony. And it still sounds pretty science fictional, even to me. But Caitlin makes—Katelyn's piece sort of reassured me that we're still on track here and things. are still a go and we're more into asteroid mining right well that gets that's we have to have the moon base first rich we have to have the station to refill you know to refuel these rockets using

the the frozen water ice that's on the lunar surface and all that's part of the deal but first stage first get to the moon and stay there and you know it i'm willing to be disappointed but at this point my hopes are up so katelyn you did that i'm going to hold you to it. Charlie. I'm going to pick a piece by Hans A. von Spakovsky and Mark Wheat called the Bill of Rights Missing Amendment. I didn't know this. This is a James Madison proposal during the time of the first amendments to write, as I often joke, we really mean it in the margins of the Constitution around the separation of powers provisions.

Madison on August 24th, 1789, proposed to the House that the Constitution have a provision that reads, The powers delegated by the Constitution to the government of the United States shall be exercised as there inappropriated so that the legislative shall never exercise the powers vested in the executive or judicial, nor the executive the powers vested in the legislative or judicial, nor the judicial the powers vested in the legislative or executive. Now, maybe had this been passed, it wouldn't have made any difference because the Constitution

is pretty clear on this, nevertheless. But Madison seemed to foresee encroachment. And I think it would be nice to be able to go to the courts and say, look, it just says it right there. So my pick is our editorial on releasing the text of the MOU and it's just to lift the curtain a little bit on our deliberations when a colleague was suggesting. We don't need editorials about that. Of course they're going to release their.

right and they haven't yet. So that's it for us. You've been listening to Nashville podcast and your rebroadcast, retransmission, or counter this game without the express written permission of National Union Magazine is strictly prohibited. This podcast has been produced by the aforementioned incomparable Sarah Shuddy, who makes the sound better than we deserve. Thank you, Charlie, thank you, Noah. Thank you, NBD. Thanks to Vair and Made In, and thanks especially to all of you for listening to the editors. See you next time.

Thank you.