This Is BIG: Podhoretz, Ferguson, and Olsen Discuss the Meaning of the Election and What’s Next

>> Peter Robinson: Journalists Andrew Ferguson, John Podhoretz, and Henry Olsen, three mellow pros on Uncommon Knowledge now.

>> Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson. A longtime journalist and columnist and a graduate of Occidental College, Andrew Ferguson is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute here in Washington. His work has appeared everywhere: Commentary, the Washington Free Beacon, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the New York Times.

You can't go into a dentist's office without finding work by Andy Ferguson. And of course, the Weekly Standard, where he served as a senior editor for more than two decades. In 1992, Andy served as a speechwriter for President George H.W Bush. His books include: Crazy U, One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College.

He is now working on a book on Richard Nixon. The journalist and political analyst Henry Olsen is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center here in Washington, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a lecturer at Hillsdale College. Henry holds an undergraduate degree from Claremont McKenna and a law degree from Chicago, which the three of us have to treat him with great deference for.

Henry's books include the Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue Collar Conservatism. Henry is famous most recently for predicting Trump's victory almost exactly right, although even Henry was surprised that Trump won Michigan.

>> Henry Olsen: I have to admit that.

>> Peter Robinson: Another longtime journalist and columnist, John Podhoretz, is the editor of Commentary Magazine and host of the daily Commentary Podcast.

John began his career as a journalist here in Washington with the Washington Times and later became one of the founders of the Weekly Standard. John has a regular column in the New York Post, he served as a speechwriter in both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and his books include Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies.

All right, boys, what just happened? This election two quotations. Former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in an interview with the New Yorker mag, I beg your pardon with the New York Times. "I don't see this election as an outright rejection of the Democratic Party. Some of the Democrats are stating, we abandoned the working class.

No, we didn't. We are the kitchen table, working class party of America. The fact is, we're set up for what comes next". Henry Olsen on a recent ricochet podcast: "what we've been seeing in voter registration data is historic. People have been moving to the Republican Party and abandoning the Democratic Party in record numbers.

This was an R+4 election, that makes it an R+ election for the first time since 1932". Nancy Pelosi says it was a little bump, Henry disagrees, Henry, explain yourself.

>> Henry Olsen: This is historic, is that we've had for over 90 years. Every election, the Democrats have more people behind them.

Republicans have been fighting uphill since Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover. That's not the case anymore, and that's why Kamala Harris lost, is that for 90 years, all the Democrats had to do was rally the base and split the independents and they win the presidential election. She rallied the base, she won the independents, and she lost by a point and a half, why?

Because there are more Republicans than Democrats. And why are there more Republicans in Democrats? Because for the last decade they've seen the Democratic Party doesn't represent them and that the Donald Trump led Republican Party might, that's a secret.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so, this is not the nation rising up to reject lawfare, it's not a one off, there's something more substantive and more permanent that just took place and it was very, very big.

Correct?

>> Henry Olsen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Now, how do you calculate, by the way, after talking to you on Rick and Shea podcast, I thought to myself, wait a minute. When you say it was an R+4 election, that means there's data that indicates, you were speaking,

>> Henry Olsen: The Exit poll says that 35% of Americans who voted say they're Republicans, 31% say they're Democrats.

>> Peter Robinson: It's as simple as that?

>> Henry Olsen: It's as simple as that. The Fox AP poll says it's R +5. So, they both agree that there's substantially more Republicans than Democrats and that's the first time since the 1930s that that's the case.

>> Peter Robinson: Now, I'm gonna stick with Henry for just a moment.

The other aspect of this that we discussed on that Ricochet podcast that I'd like to follow up on. I have you here to myself, Henry, from boys, I'll call you when we're ready for when Henry and I are ready for you. So, voter registration and R+ election for the first time since 1932, huge, not a one off, not entirely based on the personality and trials and travails of Donald J Trump, something deeper happening.

You also made the point that the change in ethnicity in people who now consider themselves Republicans is again one of these subterranean tectonic shifts. Starr county, am I remembering that correctly?

>> Henry Olsen: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: On the Rio Grande, right, one border of the county is the Rio Grande, it's between Laredo and Matamoros, 97% Hispanic, and Trump carried it by,

>> Henry Olsen: I don't know exactly the number, but he did carry it. And this is a place that was historically Democratic, it was a Democratic vote sink. These counties on the Rio Grande were historically Hispanic, they were the place where LBJ stole the 1948 Senate election with his bag of votes.

And not only did they move directly towards the Republicans in 2020, they moved even more. And now they're not a Republican vote sink, but now these are Republican areas. And you saw the change in Hispanic communities across the country. Yuma, and people talk about the Texas border. Well, the other crossing point is Yuma.

Yuma had the largest swing, in Arizona had the largest swing towards Republicans of any county in Arizona. It's also massively Hispanic. Imperial county, right next door to Yuma in California. Largest swing in California to a Republican candidate. Hispanics of all ethnicities switched on a dime. And eight years ago, we were told Donald Trump and the Republican Party is going to lose Hispanics forever because they're gonna hate him on immigration.

Actually, immigration and his desire to control it and restore jobs to their households and order to their neighborhoods is the number one issue. Why Hispanics said, I'm gonna give this guy and his party a chance.

>> Peter Robinson: What happened to the Jewish vote?

>> Henry Olsen: Jewish vote, we have very unreliable data.

Some Exit polls say it didn't move towards the Republicans, others say it did. But if you look at any congressional district or county that has a significant Jewish population, you saw a big move. Rockland county is the largest,

>> Peter Robinson: Rockland County, New York.

>> Henry Olsen: Yeah, Rockland County, New York, 30% Jewish went from basically 50/50 in 2020 to 14 points for Trump.

That's got to include a move among the Jewish population and not just the ultra Orthodox Jewish population. You're talking about normal, non Hasidic, reform, conservative, even some secular Jews who have moved to the right inferentially during the Trump election.

>> Peter Robinson: Black vote.

>> Henry Olsen: Black vote was a small increase, but still, when you get 13%, as the Exit poll said, that's the largest share of the black vote for a presidential candidate since Gerald Ford in 1976.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, boys, I put it to you, we will come to Donald Trump because we have no choice but to come to Donald Trump. And then of course, to what the administration, all of this we will come to. But here's what I found myself thinking after this conversation that I've just reconfirmed with Henry.

That for a quarter of a century, the central question in American politics, The life of the nation as a democracy has been whether identity politics would trump the usual interests and principles on which people vote. Would we, as George Will once wrote, would we end up conducting not elections, but censuses?

All the white people vote one way, all the African-Americans vote another way, all the Asians. And that, to my mind, that represented a real threat to democracy, to the functioning of the democracy in this republic. In this election, we got an answer. Identity politics will not, in any permanent way, trump people's ordinary calculations of their personal interests, the principles they want to advance, the kind of lives they want for their children.

So again, we come to Donald Trump, but something remarkable and important and quite glorious just happened. Did it not, Andrew?

>> Andrew Ferguson: Well, that depends on your point of view, Peter.

>> Peter Robinson: Well, what is your point of view?

>> Andrew Ferguson: You need context, you need historical background. The old cliche, there are no permanent victories-

>> Peter Robinson: Yes.

>> Andrew Ferguson: In politcs, I still remember the despair among Democrats in the late 80s, early 90s, we were never gonna win an election in the Electoral College. And then this governor comes out of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who actually understood what had happened to the Democratic Party and how it had started to peel away from its base and become this sort of elite bastion.

And he figured that out, and he won two consecutive terms and had a very successful presidency, if you don't count the impeachment.

>> Peter Robinson: That's right, aside from that bit.

>> Andrew Ferguson: So, and people started to think, well, if you're a Democrat, Democrats were thinking, hey, we've made it and we've picked the lock, and it didn't happen.

And so, I'm a little skeptical of any kind of long range speculation.

>> Peter Robinson: John, you take heart from this, however? Well, I do.

>> John Podhoretz: I mean.

>> Peter Robinson: Let's corner Andy into the pessimistic-

>> John Podhoretz: So, I think there's a broader story here, which is Democrats were the majority party in the United States for- Almost a century.

For almost a century. But of course, that was a very loose definition. Being a Democrat was something that had a very loose definition. How do we know that? Because from 1968 until 1992, one Democrat was elected president in, what is that, six elections? And that was the result of a crisis inside the Republican Party owing to Watergate.

Post Watergate, right. So when Ronald Reagan was elected, winning 40 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984, if you ask that question of pollsters in the exit poll, Democrats were 44% of the electorate and Republicans were 22% of the electorate. So explain to me what it meant to be a Democrat in 1980?

It meant that you could vote Republican with almost nothing. You were a Democrat because you were a Democrat, it did not have pull on you necessarily. And structurally, the House of Representatives and the gerrymandering that was done for the House institutionally kept the House of Representatives in Democratic hands for four decades.

But that was not true of the Senate, which, of course, can't be gerrymandered since there are two senators per state. And so in 1980, you could have this wholesale, 12 senators coming in with Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan has the Senate until 1986, loses the Senate, Republicans regain the Senate in 1994, they kind of lose it in 2000, then they get it back in 2002, then Democrats take it back in 2006.

The whole point that I'm trying to make is that partisan definition was a very loose thing. Over the last 20 years, it has become a tighter thing and more-

>> Peter Robinson: The parties have sorted themselves out ideologically?

>> John Podhoretz: Yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Is that what you'd like?

>> John Podhoretz: Yes, and I would say in terms of identity, it means something, it means way more to be a Republican or a Democrat now than it did for our parents.

It is one of the defining qualities of who you are that you say you are a Republican or that you're a Democrat. And as that has happened, I think it has been a necessary adjunct that the Republican Party has risen and the Democratic Party has fallen.

>> Peter Robinson: Why is it necessary, why do you say necessary?

>> John Podhoretz: Because the Democratic Party is the party of the center to the left, Republican Party is the party of the center to the right, and this is not a left wing country, and it has never been a left wing country. And there was a-

>> Peter Robinson: The country finally, to paraphrase one of your mom's wonderful phrases, the country finally joined its own side?

>> John Podhoretz: Right, well, thank you, and thank you for quoting my blessed mother. What I think is that over the last 20 years, the breakthrough book on this topic was The Big Sort published in 2004. Which said, people were literally physically gravitating to places where they lived with people who were like them.

Now, that has always been true, right? I mean, people lived in ethnic neighborhoods cuz they needed Italians live with Italians, Jews live with Jews, Irish people live with Irish, Polish people live with Polish people. But as those identities faded, the idea that it was intolerable to live in a liberal community if you were a conservative, rose, but why was that?

That was that the identity of being a liberal started defining you way more than it used to. In other words, you could be a liberal Democrat, but you were a Catholic, you lived in Boston, you still went to church every Sunday. And the Reagan voter in Macomb County, Michigan, who was a Catholic and nominally a Democrat, voted for Reagan, was your next door neighbor.

And you had way more in common with him than you had differences. And over the two generations that followed them, America's cultural changes began to define the country. And those cultural changes sorted people into ideological categories, and then they wanted to live in places where they were not confronted with lattes.

Or they wanted to live in place where people go to church.

>> Peter Robinson: Henry, what do you make of this notion that the country, John points out that the country is fundamentally center right. And as the Democrats become more consistently homogenously liberal, of course, they separate themselves from the country.

And that what happened in this election was that the country, again, to quote Mitch Dector, the country joined its own side. Is that sensible?

>> Henry Olsen: I think it depends on what you mean by center right. There are a lot of people in the Republican establishment who always took that to mean economically.

And there's not a clear sense that what-

>> Peter Robinson: Reagan was center right.

>> Henry Olsen: Reagan was center right, not right of center, which is to say that within the context.

>> Peter Robinson: What's FDR to you?

>> Henry Olsen: FDR is one of the great disruptors of American politics.

>> Peter Robinson: But is he center right?

>> Henry Olsen: No, FDR was left of center.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, all right.

>> Henry Olsen: What FDR did was change America's understanding of its relationship of the citizen to government. What Ronald Reagan did was interpret that to readmit ideas of liberty and self government into the conversation as opposed to the reigning narrative from 1932 to 1980, which was, if there's a problem, we can trust on government to solve it.

Government experts can solve poverty. Government experts can eradicate prejudice. Government experts can eliminate the business cycle. And Ronald Reagan said, no, they can't do that. But we're not gonna go back to 1928 where there's no such thing as Social Security, there's no such thing as environmental.

>> Peter Robinson: What happened two weeks ago?

>> Henry Olsen: Two weeks ago? What the Democratic Party has been doing is moving farther to the left, particularly on culture, but also across the board, than the American people want it to go. They don't want a culture of Cambridge University quads shoved down their throat in their schools. They don't want a government that is trying to bring about a green revolution that's going to put their jobs and their standard of living at risk.

They don't want a government that cares particularly more about foreigners through trade, immigration, and foreign wars than they do about their own citizens. So they've said no to that Democratic Party. What gets created in its place? Well, if you think that this is a return to classic Reaganism, you will see a waste of that opportunity, just like Obama wasted his realigning opportunity after 2008.

>> John Podhoretz: We're talking about the Hispanic vote. Yes, so we look at this, we say, okay, Hispanics-

>> Peter Robinson: Excuse me, you're onto something. Okay, don't we all wanna take some heart from the notion that the Hispanic vote moved? Identity politics don't define our democracy.

>> John Podhoretz: But that's the point that I was trying to make.

>> Peter Robinson: Go ahead.

>> John Podhoretz: There's all this talk about the Hispanic vote, they're more conservative and they go to church and they don't like trans issues and things like that. And I accept that. But on the one hand, one of the things identity politics is that it erases the essential Americanness of everybody.

So what was the experience that everybody had over the last four years? Inflation, everybody in the United States experienced inflation because inflation, it is inescapable.

>> Peter Robinson: Everybody buys groceries.

>> John Podhoretz: Who escapes inflation as a deep personal cost? Well-to-do people, the wealthier you are, the less effect inflation has, the more middle class to lower middle class to working class you are, the more inflation is a confiscatory tax on your paycheck.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> John Podhoretz: Hispanic voters, not as well to do as the Democratic base, let's say, of course, they voted to vote the bums out. Their pay check was worth 20% less in 2023 than it had been in 2019. They were just acting as Americans.

>> Andrew Ferguson: You can't make a realignment case then because 20% increase in groceries and the price of milk and stuff presumably is a one-off, and we're not gonna see that again.

Question is, then do we have another resort after this huge calamity of inflation is taken out of the equation? The other thing that isn't mentioned enough is that the Republican Party also moved to the left, which is it got rid of abortion as an issue. They tried to make it an issue, the Democrats did.

It's quite clear that Trump has no interest whatsoever in abortion as a moral issue or a political issue. Gay marriage was completely seeded, which was as recently as 16, 18 years ago, was being used by people like Karl Rove to gin up the base and get the Republicans to the polls.

That's all gone. So the Republicans had to move to the left if they wanted to win an election.

>> John Podhoretz: But a theory, what was disproved and why we should celebrate this is a theory of the electorate that should be discarded, which is that people align themselves with their identities rather than with their personal circumstances.

That they have a vowel at the end of their name is more important than what is in their bank account. And that is something that is extraordinarily bizarrely, but extraordinarily difficult for Democrats and liberals to hear because it has been their governing assumption for the last generation. And it was so prevalent that I think we were all a bit hypnotized by it too.

He attacks a judge, he says the judge can't be fair to him, Trump, cuz he's a Mexican and he's gonna do this. Well, that's it. Or Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian makes a joke about Puerto Rico being an island of garbage. Well, you got 500,000 people from Puerto Rico and Pennsylvania, he's done.

And it turns out that that idea is just wrong, it is a misunderstanding of the voter. The voter is an American and most important, in terms of immigration and why this is so hard for people to understand, including me, I don't really understand. Every voter in the United States is a legal resident of the United States.

What is more important, does a person of Cuban origin from Miami think that because somebody speaks Spanish in El Salvador that they should be allowed to cross the border and live here illegally? That is illogical in the extreme, but somehow, again, we were so marinated in this idea, culturally.

>> Peter Robinson: It's done.

>> John Podhoretz: I think it's done now. It's not done for them, though. The people that we don't agree with on this, it is gonna have to be wrenched out of them. It's like they're like Stasi agents, they're gonna return to Stasi headquarters after the Berlin Wall has fallen cuz they don't know where else to go to work.

They don't have another understanding of America outside of identity politics. They're gonna have to reconstruct it.

>> Peter Robinson: Andy, now we come, as we must, to the person of Donald Trump himself. This one is for Andy. I'm gonna set it up as I did the last segment with a couple of quotations.

Trump as a political figure, this is Charles Cook, our friend Charlie Cook in National Review on policy. Trump has some advantages over Harris, especially in the realms of illegal immigration and the judiciary. But he is a long, long way from being a conservative, and his egotism, poor discipline and lack of attention to detail make the prospect of a second term an alarming one.

Trump is a man, this is Andrew Ferguson, you may have heard of him in the Atlantic. He's up at 4 in the morning tweeting strange and incomprehensible things, giving answers 12 and 14 minutes long, repeating himself at his own press conferences. I'm always astonished to discover that the President isn't a drinker.

Andy, how could a man who answers to Charlie Cook's description, and indeed to your description Description possibly have won such a consequential election.

>> Andrew Ferguson: Well, that assumes that it's.

>> Peter Robinson: You're not granting.

>> Andrew Ferguson: That it was consequential in an epochal sort of.

>> Peter Robinson: How could he have won such an election that is deemed consequential by two out of three of my guests?

>> Andrew Ferguson: You are asking the wrong person, because I simply don't know, I mean, I find him just personally so repugnant that I could, but that's.

>> Peter Robinson: Are you a Never Trumper?

>> Andrew Ferguson: Yeah, I'd say so.

>> Peter Robinson: You are.

>> Andrew Ferguson: Probably, yeah, do I have to go now?

>> Peter Robinson: No, but now you become of archeological interest to us.

>> John Podhoretz: You make money off it, what's the matter with you? You're sitting here, if you're a Never Trumper, you should be starting committees and raising a million dollars ahead.

>> Andrew Ferguson: I've been angry with that.

>> John Podhoretz: To attack Rupert Murdoch, that's what Rick Wilson is doing, Never Trumper is a.

>> Andrew Ferguson: I got internship at the Bulwark coming up.

>> John Podhoretz: Okay, there you go. Okay. It's a cash category.

>> Peter Robinson: Here's a list of things that occurred within the first 72 hours after the election. My notes anyway, the stock market reaches new highs, corporate executives announced they will begin returning production to this country from China.

Mexico begins discouraging caravans headed toward our border, Qatar evicts Hamas leaders from its territory. Europe announces that it would begin purchasing natural gas from the United States instead of Russia. While Putin announces that he's ready, that's the way it got translated, ready to speak to the US, and President Xi of China states that he wants peaceful coexistence with us.

How can we not describe this man as a consequential figure?

>> Andrew Ferguson: Well, the causality there, the causal chain that you're trying to propose is kind of rickety. I mean, I acknowledge that he's got a kind of idiot savant political genius and a sensitivity to parts of the population.

That have either been totally ignored or misunderstood by the establishment of politicians in the country. You're leaving a lot out there, in the same 72 hours, he nominated Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General of the United States. He's got another talk show host to run the Defense Department, a guy who, so far as we know has never even run a Kiwanis Club meeting.

And there's a long string of them, and that is direct causality right there. He did that himself, so we want to make him a genius because he's a winner now. He's been a loser in the past, he'll be a loser again, but I don't want to go over.

>> Peter Robinson: I mean, we could get mired in the person of Donald Trump, of course we wanna move to policy, how will this affect this town? But at the same time, everything you say, I can't disagree with, on the other hand, look at the story. This guy is dragged into one court after another, he's shot, he emerges, fight, fight, fight, he feels apocalypse.

>> John Podhoretz: I wanna blend.

>> Peter Robinson: Go blend.

>> John Podhoretz: I wanna blend. Be the great- I'm going to do the weave.

>> Peter Robinson: Be the weave. Do the weave. Here's my weave. Be the Hegel at the time.

>> John Podhoretz: My weave is.

>> Andrew Ferguson: That means he's gonna talk for the next 45 minutes.

>> John Podhoretz: No My weave is that. These two things come together.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay.

>> John Podhoretz: This election was a rejection of the last four years, which were in policy terms, disastrous across the board. They were disastrous in domestic policy, they were disastrous in cultural policy, they were disastrous in energy policy, they were disastrous in foreign policy.

And the public, very similar in this sense to 1980, looked at what the administration and the presidency and the Democrats in charge of the House and Senate. They weren't in charge of the House, but, okay, looked and said.

>> Peter Robinson: Not this.

>> John Podhoretz: We gotta get rid of these guys, that dovetails with the move that Henry has described to the right, to the Republican Party.

Biden's victory maybe like Carter's victory in 76, would therefore be a kind of outlier as a result of exogenous circumstances. Nixon, Carter wins in part because of Watergate, and Biden wins in part because of the coronavirus. Not duplicable, everything that was done to Trump during the period that he was out of office had the perverse effect of strengthening Trump first with the Republican Party.

Because in ways that I did not fully appreciate were gona happen, it was implicitly making the case that he had made from the beginning of his run for president in 2015. That the system was rigged and it was rigged against him, and if it was rigged against him, it would be rigged against you, and then what happened?

>> Peter Robinson: They proved.

>> John Podhoretz: Inflation went up, and Nancy Pelosi is eating ice cream out of a $15,000 freezer. She has a photograph taken of herself eating ice cream out of a $15,000 freezer around about the same time or a couple a year after Gavin Newsom, having shut California down.

Goes and has dinner at the restaurant that you and I once laboriously went to in Napa Valley called the French Laundry. We drove many hours together to go to this restaurant and 20 courses. And it was amazing, but there he is after he shuts everybody else down, and the idea that the system was rigged for these guys, he was the objective correlative of that.

And that turned out though, it was good for him, we said, okay, well, that'll work with Republicans, but it's not gonna work with the general electorate. And then, guess how the system is rigged, they're trying to run this senile guy, we've been saying for two years that he's senile.

I've said it from January 2023 on my podcast with no political interest whatsoever, just, I'm watching him and they say, no. And then end of June 2024, he has the debate and they pull the switcheroo, and then what does that say to the electorate? It says.

>> Peter Robinson: It really is rigged.

>> John Podhoretz: It's all a game to them, they're just trying to hold onto power, so these two go together, it's not therefore a realigning election. The realignment, according to Henry, it's not really a realignment cuz as I say, part of the partisanship is not is more defining than it used to be.

But not quite as defining, but it's not a realigning election, but it is an election that confirms the idea that Democrats can no longer simply run a competent campaign. And assume that they have better than even odds of winning an election.

>> Peter Robinson: The person of Donald Trump, we have one view, we have another view, where do you put FDR and the realignment of the 30s is impossible without FDR?

>> Henry Olsen: Correct.

>> Peter Robinson: What happened in the 80s was not a realignment, but Democrats began voting Republicans Republican, this is impossible without Ronald Reagan, the 80s, no Reagan, no 80s. So it is of importance to this town to questions of policy, is this man a major figure, one of these large figures, who seems to come along about once every half century.

And if that's the case, you make one set of calculations if you're Jon Thune trying to run the Senate majority, and you make one set of calculations if you're Speaker Mike Johnson. But if he's a very flawed human being and the country happened to unite behind him. And he's already beginning to overreach by nominating Matt Gaetz and nominating Pete Hegseth and nominating Tulsi Gabbard and over interpreting this election result as all about him.

Then if you're Jon Thune and Mike Johnson, you make different kinds of calculations. So it is important to try to figure out how big is he and your view is.

>> Henry Olsen: He is clearly a historical figure, but what remains to be written is whether he's a successful historical figure.

Is that he has done things that no one thought possible outside of the realm of fiction, that if you were in this town.

>> Peter Robinson: You want him graphic novel territory, aren't we?

>> Henry Olsen: Yeah, well, that's what I've described, I started calling for a working class Republican Party in 2010, saying that this was our future, we had to change on economics, we had to change on culture.

It was the only way to keep this country from falling into the grips of the left, and of course, I was met with rapturous applause, not, okay?. Donald Trump is and remains the graphic novel version of what I've been calling for. But at the heart of that is that this is what America needs.

And Donald Trump in his brusqueness, in his rudeness, but also in his directness, in his courage, which is what comes out in that grace under fire. There is no denying that moment, is there? No, it's just an unbelievable moment. And you take a look at that and you say he convinced the people who had felt dispossessed for a long time that he was the man to trust.

12 years ago, the common wisdom in this town was that you either had to become more libertarian on your economics and more Christian in your social policy, or you had to basically sell out to the left. That's what the autopsy was. And Donald Trump-

>> Peter Robinson: The autopsy is after Mitt Romney loses, the Republican grandees get together and-

>> Henry Olsen: Right, and they say that-

>> Peter Robinson: We called the autopsies.

>> Henry Olsen: The autopsy is we need more of the Hispanic votes. So we need to give them immigration, we need more of the youth votes, we need to give them same sex marriage. And Donald Trump actually doing the best among Latinos in history, no one would have thought that's possible.

But actually, if you understood Latinos as opposed to your, I've never met a Latino, never been to a community, but I like tacos person here in Washington, you would have understood that. And so you can't deny that Donald Trump brought this. And I would say Reagan was a semi realignment, because before Ronald Reagan, there was no possibility that any form of conservative Republican.

Or any form of Republican that was consistent could obtain power. The Democrats had massive majorities in the Senate, they controlled virtually all of the states, they controlled the House of Representatives. And what you saw was that from that moment in 1980, when Reagan convinced his people, the Republican Party ran partisan ads in 1980 saying Vote Republican period for a change period. 

And the dual meaning was intended. You go from a 22 point gap in 1980 to a 3 point gap in 1985. And the rest of our period is fought with the Democrats having the upper ground but not the commanding heights. And that's what enables the Republicans to capture the House for most of the last three decades.

That enables them to not be a one off in the Senate, but a consistent force in the Senate. That's what enables them to go from virtually having no power in the states to dominating in the states. It was a semi realignment, and you could only get power as a Democrat by interpreting Ronald Reagan.

That was what Bill Clinton learned. And so Donald Trump has set us up for the possibility of that. But the realigning election is never the first election, it's the second election. 1932 set up 1936 Franklin Roosevelt screws up the economy, the realignment doesn't happen. Ronald Reagan screws up 1984, the realignment doesn't happen.

Donald Trump has the chance to build a realigning majority for his successor.

>> Peter Robinson: But he needs to deliver.

>> Henry Olsen: He needs to deliver, but he doesn't need to deliver in the way the establishment expects. His voters want change. They're willing to break the system. And that means unconventional ideas like tariffs like deportations.

>> Peter Robinson: Wait, these nominations that Andy mentioned of Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz Tulsi, that's not overreading the election results. That's a correct reading of the election results. The country returned Donald Trump to break furniture.

>> Henry Olsen: The biggest problem with these people is that they may be incompetent at breaking furniture because he's choosing the wrong type of disruptor.

>> John Podhoretz: Well, that I think is the important point, which is, you know who wanted to break furniture? Donald Rumsfeld, when he went to the Pentagon in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld had an entire plan for the complete overhaul of the pension.

>> Peter Robinson: The revolution in military affairs.

>> John Podhoretz: Right, that was halted by 911 when you actually had to then fight a war and therefore revolutionizing.

And he tried to do both at the same time, which was-

>> Andrew Ferguson: Didn't work.

>> John Podhoretz: Which was a fool's errand. Bill Barr, whom Trump now reviles, wanted to break furniture at justice, but he's a phlegmatic but quietly, so Gates is all I'll break furniture, now what? It's like he's gonna break furniture but he's.

>> Peter Robinson: Where's the furniture break, how do I do this?

>> John Podhoretz: That's why what Henry said is so important. I do think this election was a judgment on one of the worst presidencies in American history judging by results. Trump therefore has a kind of a low bar. If he just doesn't screw it all up and things remain relatively even keeled the economy does okay to pretty well.

He fulfills some of his promises on deportations and immigration, which by the way will be very easy to fulfill. So we're talking about deportations, right? So there are 15 million people theoretically to deport.

>> Peter Robinson: 15 million people here illegally.

>> John Podhoretz: Okay, so let's say.-

>> Peter Robinson: Undocumented.

>> John Podhoretz: Let's say that when all is said and done, he only, this is gonna sound like, he only deports 500,000 of them.

There's no voice on the other side that is gonna say-

>> Peter Robinson: Should have been more.

>> John Podhoretz: Yeah, you haven't done enough, you're a bum. Come to me, I'll deport more people. They're saying no human being should be deported. And so his bar on immigration is stunningly low. He can clear it with simply by doing a couple of things.

And the effect of that will be, there will be self deportation and the flooding of the border will stop. Because the idea will be the authorities are gonna come after you if you come across the border, why bother? He's set up for success there. Tariffs is the big question for me with you, because tariffs is the thing, that is the disruptive element in modern neoliberal economic.

If he goes to tariffs, he is breaking the chain of a kind of 40 year consensus on how to approach.

>> Peter Robinson: There was some interview just before the election. Sorry, I can't remember exactly where it was. Where he was pushed on tariffs, by the way to his credit, he sat down for a lot of interviews in which people did push him.

Not in a directly confrontational Mike Wallace of the old 60 minutes way, but you sit down for an hour with a podcaster and you get led into territory where you might, okay, but he got pushed on tariffs. And he said, no, no, there won't be any tariffs. Wait a minute, you're calling no, no, there won't be any tariffs, was Trump's answer.

I'm getting this, I'm paraphrasing. Of course. What do you mean there won't be any tariffs? Well, because all you have to do to avoid a tariff is move your factory to this country and that's what everybody will do. So again, it's extremely hard to know quite what he's pledged himself to do.

>> John Podhoretz: Or our enemies or our rivals or whatever will moderate their behavior and stop stealing our intellectual property and stop doing this, that and the other thing. And therefore I won't impose tariffs. They will self tariff Or some version of that so that I don't have to do it.

But he has to for this realignment, for the 1936 election to happen for J.D. Vance or whoever is his successor, that's the election where Roosevelt won 48 states, right?

>> Andrew Ferguson: Right, 46.

>> John Podhoretz: 46, excuse me cuz there were only 48 then, right? As goes Maine, so goes Vermont.

Was that it? Interestingly not the states you would say today would be the ones that would go the other way. He has to succeed or be seen-

>> Peter Robinson: We come back to that in a moment. First, however, Andrew, the media again, two quotations. Do you like this two quotation thing?

No, don't tell me, don't tell me. The first comes from someone who believes in legacy journalism enough to have purchased the Washington Post in 2013 and who have subsidized it ever since. In an essay the post published in late October, Jeff Bezos, the owner and of course the founder of Amazon.

In annual public surveys, journalists have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year's Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted, all right? Second quotation from venture capitalist David Sacks. Some who lives out in my neck of the woods in Northern California.

This is a bankruptcy moment for the legacy media. They shrieked Nazi, fascist, traitor and insurrectionist at the top of their lungs. And the country didn't believe it. The spell is broken, close quote. Well, the Washington Post, the New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, the whole legacy media. What does this mean?

Is the spell broken?

>> Andrew Ferguson: Well, I don't think the spell has been there for a long time. You remember this beating up on the press. It goes back to Nixon as a successful strategy. And of course the press ended up winning that one.

>> Peter Robinson: Well, that's the point, and they also made a lot of money.

CBS, NBC, the New York, those were all profitable enterprises in those days.

>> Andrew Ferguson: But I think this is simply an acknowledgement of what's already happened. There isn't a singular media anymore. That doesn't mean that the establishment media, the legacy media is without a business model or anything. You forget, I mean, there were still 70 million people plus who voted for Democrats.

>> Peter Robinson: Yes, exactly.

>> Andrew Ferguson: And there is the New York Times is probably makes more money now than it ever has because it wisely positioned itself as a, not as the newspaper of record, but as the newspaper of certain kinds of readers.

>> Peter Robinson: Of whom there are plenty.

>> Andrew Ferguson: Of whom there are plenty to make a living.

And now the Washington Post hasn't been able to figure out how to do that. And I'm kind of surprised. I mean, they still lose money hand over fist. The network news people are gonna die simply by virtue of technological changes that make it kind of inconvenient to watch the TV news.

But there is still a market, a huge market for liberal leaning reporting in Congress.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so let me put it to you in a different, slightly different way. Journalism, broadly construed. I visited my own alma mater, Dartmouth College last year, and I spent an evening talking to the kids who run the Dartmouth Review, which is the conservative student newspaper.

And I said, very impressive kids. Really wonderful, impressive kids. And show of hands, how many of you wanna go into journalism? And not only did not a single hand go up, but I got blank faces as if to say what a strange question to ask. And in my generation, Paul Gigault, who's the editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Paul and I were at Dartmouth College together. In my generation, lots of us wanted to go into journalism. It still felt like there was a career to be had there and meaning and fun and excitement, and it's gone. And does this not A, break your heart and B, worry you a little bit about the nature of democracy.

Who's gonna be doing investigative reporting?

>> Andrew Ferguson: Yeah, there's a.

>> Peter Robinson: Or am I overwrought about the whole process?

>> Andrew Ferguson: No, there's a real problem there, but that's almost a- Is that a separate matter? A technical problem. I mean, you really are not gonna have farm teams for, at local news levels, for people who have to sit on their butts for three hours at the local county board meeting and write down what it said.

Now, we're gonna have AI do that, evidently, cover the high school sports team. That's how you learn a lot, or how people traditionally have learned how to become reporters. If all of that rung in the ladder is stripped away, journalism is gonna have a very hard time. But again, that's not an ideological matter or a political matter, that's a technological thing.

>> Peter Robinson: Is your heart broken, boys?

>> John Podhoretz: My heart is so unbroken. My heart swells. Let me tell you a story, Peter.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, you tell me.

>> I've told a story, you tell a story John.

>> John Podhoretz: In 1982, when I was 21 years old, I wrote my first book proposal.

And the book proposal was on the dishonesty of 60 Minutes, then the most powerful, the number one television show in the United States, ranked number one above MASH. I mean, it was the most-

>> Andrew Ferguson: Not just the news show, it was number one, full stop.

>> John Podhoretz: And if you remember, the 60 Minutes had a technique.

They investigated people. They brought them in. They sweated. The people sweated. They cut the interviews.

>> Peter Robinson: Up like the sweat on your forehead.

>> John Podhoretz: Right, and so I had this idea for a book on writing about the dishonesty of 60 Minutes. And there was a conservative foundation that wanted to support it.

And I went around to publishing houses and people said, we can't publish that. There's no way on earth we could publish that. It's a very interesting idea, but we can't be in that relation with CBS or 60 Minutes. It's too dangerous.

>> Peter Robinson: Why now? Why do I mention this?

>> John Podhoretz: Because 42 years ago, people like me and Andy, when he started writing for the American Spectator. Andy wrote a column for me for what, four years on the media, we have been doing nothing but talking about the depredations of the mainstream media. Our entire careers as unconventional people in the mainstream media.

I mean, I've worked in mainstream publications. I worked at Time, I worked at US News, I've worked at Conservative publications. I worked at the Washington Times, I've worked at the New York Post.

>> Peter Robinson: He has a hard time holding a job, this man. It's terrible.

>> John Podhoretz: And I worked at, and Andy and I worked together.

Together at the Weekly Standard, which we helped start together, which was a magazine of opinion but had a lot of reporting in it. And the topic that is the most enduring, because the Soviet Union disappeared and abortion has disappeared and I don't know what else has disappeared. The enduring topic of fascination for all of us is the misbehavior of the liberal media and the degradation of it and the self destruction of it is devoutly to be wished, now, all destructions, let's.

>> Andrew Ferguson: And now what are we gonna do?

>> John Podhoretz: Okay, but wait, all destructions, we, I think all thought that Roe v Wade was a disgraceful and destructive constitutional atrocity.

>> Peter Robinson: 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing creating a right to abortion.

>> John Podhoretz: Right, that the decision was a constitutional atrocity and that the proper treatment of it by the Supreme Court ultimately would be that it would be overturned, and that happened.

>> Peter Robinson: Years ago in 2022. Dobbs, correct.

>> John Podhoretz: Okay, then it's a total crap show because this happens and then you have to figure out what comes next. Like you said, Trump is uninterested in abortion, Trump's claim is, hey, you all wanted me to get rid of Roe v, Wade, I appointed three justices, we got rid of Roe v Wade.

Salute me, celebrate me, now it's up to you, as for me, I think some of these restrictions you wanna put on are too, that's my opinion, they're too severe. But that's what you wanted from me and that's what I gave you, similarly with the media, the slow motion destruction of the structure of the media over the last century has created nothing but chaos.

And out of that chaos will come something better, something better, not worse, less self worth. I'm sorry that people aren't gonna go work on the paper in Springfield, Ohio. So that there's no paper in Springfield, Ohio, so that the local guy could cover whether or not the dogs are being eaten by the Haitians or not.

One of the things that would have happened had there been a paper in Springfield, Ohio, maybe there is a paper in Springfield, Ohio, I don't even know. But there used to be a whole system of training journalists that will not take place anymore, but the system created a funnel.

And the funnel, like all funnels, like all funnels in corporate, the worlds of corporate were who could slither their way up through the funnel, not who was best at it, not who was. Who was the one who could be the least offensive to the greatest number of people to get themselves highlighted and spotlighted by the people who shared their priors and believed the same things.

That they believed and therefore made things like the rise of Trump not only invisible to us all, but shocking. And I submit to you that Donald Trump from 2010 onward was preparing long before Obama insulted him at the White House. Correspondence, which was, Trump started going on media that were invisible to us, he was going on Alex Jones, he was appearing at UFC fights and talking to the commentators.

He was going on local talk radio, Roger Stone was booking him on these shows. He spent five years building up a constituency in a world that I called proletarian media. So that the minute that he actually pulled the trigger and started running for president, he was at 15% in the polls in the Republican Party.

Name another person that would have, you could say, well, he was Donald Trump, so he was on the Apprentice.

>> Peter Robinson: I can name another person that's Ronald Reagan's weekly radio talks that were ignored in all the media capitals. Nobody in New York ever paid any attention to it, but they were listening to Ronald Reagan and Moline and Des Moines.

Henry, you on the media, do you have anything to add to these two August figures?

>> Henry Olsen: Look, do.

>> Peter Robinson: You share John's schadenfreude, the best Freud of them all?

>> Henry Olsen: Yeah, look, the liberal media brought it on themselves, they brought it on themselves by stopping to be journalists and starting to be partisans and mouthpieces.

And it's true in the television stations, it's true in the elite radio stations, it's true in the elite newspapers and in many of the non elite newspapers. But they had to deal with something that is something none of them had to think about, which is that the high day of modern media is a technological accident.

Of limitation of spectrum space for television and the elimination of what used to be the case in America, which is multiple competing dailies. Washington D.C, had four competing dailies in the 1930s.

>> John Podhoretz: New York had 11.

>> Henry Olsen: New York had 11, so what happens is everybody looks at this rosy period, which was in accident.

Now you have competition, what they were from the 1960s to the 1990s was the media version of the department store. You used to have a department store that would be the entity in each local area together. You get your housewares, you get your furniture, you get your clothes, everything together, and they would make the selections for you and the scale would produce cheaper prices.

What happens? Affluence destroys the model, you can go out and you can buy exactly what type of things you can want at a boutique clothing store or at a boutique furniture store on the higher end. So the higher end departs the department store, the lower end, fine, well, Walmart can get something that I can afford better, that I like better at a better price.

The department store is destroyed by competition and it's still being destroyed by competition. The legacy media was the department store that is destroyed by high end competition and low end competition. And the New York Times has adapted by basically becoming a boutique, a boutique for progressives and people who.

I may not like the politics, but I like the arts and.

>> John Podhoretz: They like cooking and they like games.

>> Peter Robinson: Which the New York Times also sell.

>> John Podhoretz: No, it's not separately also, it is, it's not separately. You can get cooking, you have to. Okay, but the game people, 2 million people a day do the time spelling bee, 2 million people a day.

>> Peter Robinson: That's my wife, she's doing it 2 million times.

>> John Podhoretz: But that's what I'm, saying is in that sense you're exactly right that what happened.

>> Peter Robinson: Hold on, hold on, let me ask closing question about the media because I want to get back to Trump for just a kind of closing.

It's occurring to me now, Michael Barone makes the point that in from the founding of the country through much of the 19th century, the point you make. That every small town in the country had two or three different newspapers and the newspapers tended to be quite partisan, the so and so Democrat, the such and such Republican.

And the country was fine, the country was fine, the economy grew, the democracy was boisterous, but the country was fine. You are fundamentally not worried whatever is a borning is gonna be okay with regard to media and journalism, I can't even bring a tear to your eye.

>> Andrew Ferguson: No, I think we're gonna miss it when it's gone.

>> John Podhoretz: I'm gonna miss it, but I miss a lot of things, I miss the old Hollywood, I miss publishing better books, I miss a lot of the cultural, the things that I had that were the.

>> Andrew Ferguson: My point is slightly different, it's going to make our jobs harder, I mean you go through past issues of Commentary, National Review, the American Spectator, all of right wing media is.

Absolutely, parasitic in a way. I mean, that's a bad word to use on the mainstream media and The New York Times, CBS News and the Washington Post. What's gonna happen to all of that infrastructure when you take that central organism away from it?

>> John Podhoretz: I think that the reason to be optimistic is that there was a lot of chaff in that wheat and a lot of that chaff was poisonous.

And that a lot what we need with the wheat will be repurposed in ways that we don't entirely know yet, but that there'll be different chaff. And we already know what the chaff is now, the chaff is Tucker, the chaff is Tucker Carlson, the chaff is Alex Jones, is Alex Jones.

But I mean, the chaff is people who are peddling not only lies, but kind of their own version of what I would consider the demonization of the United States and the west and things like that. But there's gonna be a lot of wheat, it's just that we're living through the commentary podcast, thank you very much.

>> Peter Robinson: You take over a storied magazine as editor, and now you've launched a commentary podcast. But I don't know how many listeners you have, but you've got one at this table that I know of.

>> John Podhoretz: Thank you, yes.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, so, boys, you touched on a point, last questions, last round of questions.

Although we could, well, who knows? Let's go talk for two hours more, we'll let the editors worry about cutting the show down to length. Why are you cutting the show?

>> John Podhoretz: It's online.

>> Peter Robinson: It's good point, people can cut it themselves.

>> John Podhoretz: Joe Rogan's like four hours.

>> Peter Robinson: Please.

>> John Podhoretz: Four hours.

>> Peter Robinson: Start bring out.

>> John Podhoretz: Where's your joint? Let's all smoke a joint, we'll.

>> Peter Robinson: Thank you John, please get him under control. What do you miss?

>> Andrew Ferguson: Get him high.

>> Peter Robinson: This is not the last of the last questions, I was thinking about this the other day.

Well, as I was making these notes ask you guys, and I thought to myself, I miss working for people who had served in, or at least had vivid memories of the Second World War. Ronald Reagan did not do combat duty, his vision relegated him to a morale, but he still served.

He wore a uniform, he produced morale films. George H.W Bush served in a perfectly heroic fashion, 58 missions, one of which he was shot down. And I realized these men for whom they were large figures to us, of course, but we knew them, we worked for them. And looking back on it, I think to myself that we were surrounded by figures, who at Some ultimate visceral level understood the stakes.

They'd seen what could happen when it all slid off the table, do you think that's true?

>> Henry Olsen: I think that look.

>> Peter Robinson: In other words, that there's something that the people haven't been through with those people. We work for guys who came up during the depression and then went off to fight a war and then came home to rebuild the country.

That sort of epic is missing now.

>> Henry Olsen: Well, the epic is missing in part because of the great success of the United States since 1945.

>> Peter Robinson: Well, that's right. It's missing because they didn't want us to live through it, right?

>> Henry Olsen: Yeah and people who live through the excitement of the Reagan administration has the closest thing to the epic.

When I was growing up, I never thought that we were gonna win the Cold War without a fight and instead we win the Cold Four without a shot, much less without a fight.

>> Andrew Ferguson: The economy gets.

>> Henry Olsen: Republicans would take the House.

>> Henry Olsen: Yeah, look, that was when we were growing up, nobody talked about mutual funds, nobody talked about entrepreneurship.

And suddenly you've got this dynamic, innovative economy that did not exist when we were growing up. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. We have this peaceful American primacy world that is fading because primacy is unnatural in human affairs. But it gave us a period of peace and a lack of stakes in global affairs.

Thank you, Ronald Reagan I think I understand why people who worked during that era look nostalgically at the greatness. But no, we have not lived through great times, we are about ready to go into challenging and great times. And when we come through them, which we will, the people who are in their 20s will look at the people in their 40s, through their 60s and say they're walked giants.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, here comes, you have just set it up. This is going to be the last question, and here's how it's gonna work, Henry, John, Andy. This means that while the two of them are talking, you can make notes surreptitiously if you'd like, ere's the last question then.

Again, I was thinking this over and I thought my mind was running in exactly the grooves you just laid out for us. 92 decades, 1970s stagflation, reversal in the Cold War, as the Soviets advance in Asia and Latin America and Africa and the collapse in national morale. I looked this up, Jimmy Carter In June of 1979, the famous Malaise speech.

I'm quoting him now, this is the President of the United States, "the threat is a crisis of confidence It strikes at the very heart of our national will." and in 1979, the Soviets invade Afghanistan and Iranians take Americans hostage. One decade later, which in historic terms is nothing.

It's the blink of an eye, one decade later, by 1989, we undergo a renewal, economic expansion, rebuild the military, recapturing national morale. That 1984 reelection slogan, mourning again in America, sounds hopelessly corny to my kids, but it rang true enough to voters to give Ronald Reagan 49 out of 50 states.

1979, the Soviets invade Afghanistan and the Iranians take Americans hostage. And 1989, the Berlin WAFF. Are we capable? What I find so riveting about your analysis of this election that we just went through, is that it almost suggests to my limited mind that the political predicate for a period of really sustained renewal has now fallen into place.

Are we capable? Is there some possibility that we stand at the beginning of a renewal today like the one we went through in the 80s?

>> Henry Olsen: Of course, because we're Americans. It's the American heritage, what it requires is leadership and political will. I think that's what Americans yearn for, I think they've been given people who have promised leadership and they have been given fecklessness for 20 to 30 years.

And Donald Trump promises that sort to a large number of people, shocks and offends a number of people who would be open to a different type of leader. But I think he has broken the system enough so that real dramatic. Just like Ronald Reagan failed in the 60s and the 70s, but when the time met the man in 1980, he was capable of stepping up.

I don't know if Trump is capable of stepping up, I know his vice president is.

>> Peter Robinson: John, renewal.

>> John Podhoretz: I think when people look back at this period 100 years from now, they will look back on this period the way we looked back at the end of the 20th century to the end of the 19th century.

By which I mean the period between 1875 and 1900 was the worst period in American political history, in the sense that we had extraordinarily undistinguished Presidents. We had.

>> Peter Robinson: 50, 50 country.

>> John Podhoretz: We had a 50, 50 country, we had assassinations, we had the Grover Cleveland in, out, in that Trump has now duplicated massive amounts of immigration, incredible disruption.

Corruption, rise of populism, the populist party, Tom Watson, the fight over the gold standard and all of that. Corruption, corruption. And nobody remembers any of those people unless you were a historian or somebody. What do they know about 1875 to 1900? It was the period in which the United States became the richest country in the world, it built the railways, telephony, the automobile, and eventually a 1903 flight.

And what we know about America was it was the most innovative country on earth. It was the revolution that changed everything for the next hundred years, and the politics are inconsequential. And it's my view that what will matter in 2124 is Elon Musk catching the rocket that was shot up and down.

The development of the completely interconnected communications world that is causing so much difficulty and so much disruption and teenage suicides because social media is so terrible. And all of that stuff that these revolutionary periods like the Industrial Revolution caused. Living through the disruption is awful, you think that the world is coming to an end, and in fact you are just in transit from one period to another.

So if I'm right about this, no one will remember Barack Obama, except that he was the first black president. No one will remember Joe Biden will be a trivia question, and Donald Trump will be this kind of, boy, that was weird, this crazy guy came in and did crazy things.

And that was one of the marks that everything else was happening elsewhere, that the people who might have been the leaders that you're talking about might have gone into public service after World War II. They didn't go into public service.

>> Peter Robinson: The kids who didn't raise their hand at Dartmouth because they didn't wanna be journalists, they're all headed off to venture capital.

>> John Podhoretz: Venture capital or they wanna create, so that's the joke. When I was a kid, people wanted to go to Hollywood, now they wanna make an app. But the person who wants to make an app, who knows what that app will be or what that means? So I have this terrific optimism that politics.

Now, the problem is, in the 1870s and 1880s, the federal government was a tiny- Was tiny. Little nothing, and now we're-

>> Peter Robinson: And there was no Xi Jinping, there was no Vladimir Putin.

>> John Podhoretz: Right.

>> Peter Robinson: There was no crisis.

>> John Podhoretz: No, but there was Karl Marx, there were the revolutionaries throughout Europe- Well, not until the.

>> Peter Robinson: Who were going to destroy.

>> John Podhoretz: And we were gonna end up in World War I. Not we, America, but the world was gonna end up in World War I, which was. So all I'm saying is that my feeling is that with the exception of the fact that we're gonna somehow have to pay down this national debt and we're about to hit this fiscal cliff that is going to destroy the entitlement.

Can I just?

>> Peter Robinson: I love the argument, but I can't quite, I just can't. The federal government is just too big and too much in hock and too much in our lives to. All right, go ahead.

>> John Podhoretz: Elon Musk bought Twitter for $54 billion and didn't go broke.

Explain to me how that's possible, why would you-

>> Andrew Ferguson: He has a lot of money.

>> John Podhoretz: That's what it is.

>> Peter Robinson: Andrew Ferguson, national renewal or do you find the question-

>> Andrew Ferguson: Well, it's-

>> Peter Robinson: Or have I framed it in a hysterical manner in the first place?

>> Andrew Ferguson: No, I think you're, you're, it's a- It's a fair question.

It's a serious, real question. And my sort of fatuous, trite answer is you just never bet against America, it's just stupid. And I think it will, but it's based on a couple of things. One is a free economy in which the labor markets are kept free, capital is allowed to go where it needs to go to be most usefully deployed, you've got that on the one hand.

And then you have the character of the people, because this is one of the things that John is referring to, is you need good character to take advantage of the free economy. And the free economy depends on the good character of the people.

>> Peter Robinson: Hard work, personal sacrifice, family.

>> Andrew Ferguson: And this is why, as silly as some people think my never Trumpism is, is actually very important to me, I think because he is the president, we look at presidents in different ways. He is a man of manifestly terrible character, I'll grant you the physical, courage, and he is surrounding himself with people of bad character.

And that has to have some kind of influence on the second part that I was talking about, which is the character of the country itself, of people. Maybe I think we'll survive him, I think he's kind of silly enough that he won't have any long lasting effect in that regard, but-

>> John Podhoretz: Can I speak to that because, so you're talking about freeing the economy. I think one of the things we haven't even talked about, the main issue people talked today on my podcast for an hour about transgenderism. The most important issue in this election dealing with, aside from inflation, in my view, given where the votes were that Trump needed to win, was fracking, was energy.

Energy was the hidden issue of this election and the story of the last-

>> Peter Robinson: Did it drive Pennsylvania?

>> Henry Olsen: No, I mean, it helped, but Pennsylvania is not dependent on fracking outside of a few small counties. What drove Pennsylvania was the same thing as it drove elsewhere. He gained dramatically among Puerto Ricans.

For all in Philadelphia and Reading, he increased vote share in non-fracking areas across the board among blue collar voters.

>> John Podhoretz: What I mean is that in 2007, the United States began doing hydraulic fracturing.

>> Peter Robinson: Correct.

>> John Podhoretz: This is the most important geopolitical development of the 21st century, it has-

>> Peter Robinson: Because within five years.

>> John Podhoretz: We're energy independent, energy exporters, we killed the power of the Gulf states. There would have been a time when what happened in Venezuela, which was the fourth largest oil exporter in the world-

>> Peter Robinson: Would have mattered.

>> John Podhoretz: Everything that happened in Venezuela would be front page news because Venezuela was so important to the world economy.

And now Venezuela, which just had another stolen election, does anyone even know the name of the guy that the election was stolen from? We don't pay any attention. Part of the story has been a fight between the Republican Party to unleash fracking, to take the handcuffs off fracking, and the Democratic Party desperately attempting to handcuff frackers and to retard the advance.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> John Podhoretz: Okay, so if I bring this up only to say that the character issues here are, are we unleashing the American people or are we attempting to control and contain the American people? And the character of the president matters because in this case that's a different form of handcuffing.

If we have morally compromised leadership, it makes the job of America's advance harder because it does say you can gull your way through things, you can lie, you can cheat. He did it, it's okay, there are no consequences for your actions as long as you get powerful enough.

These are terrible lessons for people to learn. But they're a form of moral, they're a form of bad restraint. They unleash bad things as opposed to good things. And so I do think Andy's right, we can't just say it's fine that Trump was, it doesn't matter that he's a person of bad character.

But I think it's one of these things that you have to cope with, the way you have to cope with and fight the people who wanna say it's terrible. That we are making America the most important country in the world when it comes to producing natural energy and gas, which still runs the world.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, the question Andy said he's surrounding himself, the President elect is surrounding himself with bad people, you put it more eloquently. But about half of the nominees are actually quite impressive people, aren't they, Marco, Ruben? So how do you balance this question of character? You're a political analyst, you talk about polls, characters a little bit out of your usual Bailey work, but you'd grant that it's importance?

>> Henry Olsen: No, I mean, it's one thing to study.

>> Peter Robinson: Who's the man who just got, so it's Doug Burgum at the Department of the Interior and Chris, Sean Duffy is gonna be Energy-

>> Andrew Ferguson: Transportation.

>> Peter Robinson: Transportation, who just got named Energy.

>> Henry Olsen: Right, Fracking guy.

>> Peter Robinson: A fracking guy, and Trump has established a National Energy Council, all these very impressive.

>> Andrew Ferguson: Under Bergam.

>> Peter Robinson: Under Bergam, all those guys are.

>> Henry Olsen: Former energy exec.

>> Peter Robinson: These are all tremendously impressive. Okay, so question of character, sorry, how do you weigh?

>> Henry Olsen: Look, question of character, I think we put too much importance on the character of one person and not enough importance on the character of the people.

That one of the things I keep hearing about is I talk about the possibility of American renewal, I say we're not capable of it. The American people are debauched, the American people are this. No, the American people are not. Do I wish that Donald Trump were more of an upstanding, honest person?

Absolutely, do I think that the flip side of his ruthlessness is a degree of determination that has taken on the most concerted, detrimental, ill intended onslaught of elites since Franklin Roosevelt? And taken them to task? Unfortunately, yes, look, no one looks at Franklin Roosevelt and says his private life was a matter of this is a guy who had multiple affairs and was known for being notoriously duplicitous.

>> Peter Robinson: He was not a saint.

>> Henry Olsen: He was not a saint, and he was a man who could say in 1936 that his opposition were united in their hate for him, and he welcomed their hatred. Donald Trump, if he were more eloquent, could say that, and he would have every justification of doing so.

I think the American people are ready for renewal. I think the American people hunger for renewal. And I believe that if Trump is successful, he will set up JD Vance to be the that Trump will be Moses. He will lead America to the renewal and Vance will provide it.

>> Andrew Ferguson: Andy, Hallelujah.

>> John Podhoretz: I heard him compared to King David in the first term. This is the first time I've heard him compared to Moses, so I gotta say.

>> Peter Robinson: He's much taller, last question for you. We came here, the three of us, you were in politics, you fit.

But we knew each other all these years ago. We came to Washington in the 80s because we wanted in. We felt there was something big and exciting happening and we wanted in. I don't know about you, but I work at the Hoover Institution, which is in the middle of the Stanford campus.

And I have received emails from kids saying, how do I get my resume in front of somebody in the Trump transition team? What's your advice to some 22 or 23 or 24 year old kid who's us today who says something big is happening, I wanna move to Washington.

>> Andrew Ferguson: I hate to say this, but I've had that conversation.

>> Peter Robinson: You must have.

>> Andrew Ferguson: I would wave them off because I think that Trump is a bomb that could go off at any time. And you never know what the collateral damage is gonna be. If Trump succeeds, one of the great things that will happen is a devaluing of the importance of politics and government, sort of along the lines that you were saying.

And if that's the case, you're better off going out into the country. And even though it hurts my property values, you're better off going out into the country and trying to build a business or start a soup kitchen or something like that. I think it's dangerous to be here with him at the top.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, you get the last word, Andrew Ferguson, Henry Olsen, John Podhoretz, all three of you very close friends. I'm grateful for the chance to jabber, thank you, gentlemen.

>> Andrew Ferguson: Thank you.

>> Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.