Andrew Clavin and Jonah Goldberg dissect Trump’s presidency as a chaotic disruption—praised for deregulation and judicial picks but criticized for alienating conservatives with erratic rhetoric, like his NFL flag controversy or Roy Moore endorsement. Goldberg, a "Trump skeptic," rejects "Never Trump" post-election but warns the president’s impulsive style undermines conservative values, comparing him to a system-breaking force like McMurphy. Meanwhile, Clavin mocks media sensationalism—from CNN’s "swamp monster" conspiracy to intersectional feminism’s jargon—arguing Trump’s policy wins are overshadowed by scandal-driven "news porn." Both agree: Trump’s legacy hinges on whether his chaos delivers lasting conservative gains or deepens GOP fractures. [Automatically generated summary]
In New York yesterday during the morning commute, a man tried to set off a bombshell and instead blew himself up.
The man was later identified as a CNN reporter.
Authorities say the explosive device was what they call a pipe dream bomb made out of hastily assembled bits of nonsense about Russia, unprovable charges of sexual harassment, and absurd stories from anonymous sources about how much Diet Coke the president drinks.
Fortunately, the president was unharmed by the blast, but the CNN anchor had his credibility blown clean off along with his testicles.
Investigators say the CNN journalist was not a lone wolf, but was in fact part of a larger organization called CNN.
The operatives there have apparently been inspired by watching anti-American videos made by ISIS, the Democrat Party, and Hollywood, including this propaganda from one sinister source.
I had a boyfriend many years ago.
He was my first boyfriend who had his own house.
And one day I went outside to see what he was doing, and he was hoisting an American flag up the flagpole in his front yard.
And I instantly felt very weird.
It didn't make sense, but I felt this feeling of like I felt scared.
Yeah, I felt scared.
It's chilling, I know.
The authorities have advised New Yorkers and all other Americans to be on the lookout for anyone who looks like a Middle Eastern male, a movie actor, or a mainstream journalist.
However, police don't want to spread panic and say it's unlikely you will actually see anyone from CNN unless you're watching them on television, which almost never happens.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Shipshape, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoora.
All right, we have Jonah Goldberg here today, who is from the National Review, one of my favorite political writers.
He really is.
And yet, I disagree with him a lot on Trump.
So we had a really interesting conversation.
It was pre-taped.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
And you got to get questions in because I'm traveling all day today, and I will be flying back tomorrow morning.
So the only show I will have, maybe an all-mailbag show for all I know.
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Join the conversation and the mailbag and all that stuff.
So that's a lot of stuff for you to do.
Don't do it yet because we have a lot to talk about.
The first thing we have to talk about is Skillshare.
Skillshare.
You know, this is kind of funny because we have this wonderful podcast.
It's now coming down into like the last third of the first season, Another Kingdom that Knowles and I did.
I wrote it, and Knowles performs this suspense, fantasy suspense story, and it's just been doing so well.
But when we started out, I suddenly realized that I don't really know how to do a podcast.
I mean, I know how to do a podcast here with all these wonderful people around doing stuff, but I didn't know how to do it on our own.
We had to do it on our own.
In fact, there was an actual picture on Instagram when we started recording it, and we thought, this is cool.
We'll put out a picture of ourselves recording on Instagram.
And then we found out we were using the mic wrong.
It was one of those Yeti mics, and we were talking at the end of it like it was one of these mics, but you got to talk into the face of it.
And people were writing in, telling us how dumb we looked.
So I went on Skillshare and I started to look up their podcast tapes, which I did.
It really was good.
They have these classes.
They have over 3 million members, over 17,000 classes.
It's kind of the Netflix for online learning.
You go on and you can take classes in whatever you want, graphic design, DSLR, photography, social media marketing, digital illustration, podcasts, and much more.
I've also gone on the writing ones just to test them out because I've lived my life as a writer, but I tested them out to see if they're good.
And there's excellent classes on writing, marketing, and just the use of the language and all kinds of things.
Skillshare classes are taught by industry experts, experienced professionals, and they're perfect if you're looking to build your career or start a side career, something that you've always dreamed of doing.
All kinds of things, again, Adobe Illustrator, photography, marketing, entrepreneurship, and Skillshare is giving my listeners a one-month free trial of unlimited access to over 17,000 classes.
That's free.
F-R-E-E.
Just go to www.skillshare.com/slash Andrew.
You get a free month, skillshare.com/slash Andrew, and you get a free month of Skillshare.
Test them out.
You'll see what I'm talking about.
So, yesterday, I was speaking about the way that moral panic is being used to distract us from actual morality, from the actual things that government does that have to do with our morality.
Because what government doesn't do is govern our sex lives or govern their sex lives or govern anything.
It has nothing to do, their sex lives have nothing to do with us.
What it has to do with us is our freedom.
And, you know, the thing is, we enjoy this too.
It's like pornography.
It really is.
It is like pornography.
We are more interested in the stories about Roy Moore diddling a 14-year-old, if he ever did, than we would be interested in stories about regulation.
You know, over the weekend, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal, where they know a thing or two about business, saying the reason the economy is doing so incredibly well is because of Trump pulling back all the regulations.
And if you see a chart between how many regulations Trump has issued versus the last presidents, it's amazing.
I mean, he's reduced regulations to a trickle as well as getting rid of old regulations.
But that's not interesting.
Now, I talk about that.
I've talked about this on the show.
I've talked about how important it was way before Trump took office, way before he was even running.
I've talked about regulation, but I know that it's not what grabs you.
Sex grabs you.
And all of us enjoy talking about this stuff.
And it works exactly.
The news is now working exactly the way pornography works.
If you are a guy, you have probably looked at pornography.
If you hadn't, haven't, just send me a self-addressed stamped envelope.
I'm joking, don't do that.
Just a couple of bucks, and I'll send you some pornography.
But when you look at pornography, if you're paying attention, you see that men are wired so that when they look at naked women, basically, or something that excites them, a little click goes off in your head.
And the whole art of life is making sure that's all we are as bodies.
We're just a series of clicks and chemical reactions as bodies.
That's what we are.
But if you want to be the full human being that God made you to be, that you're supposed to be, that you know you're not, you start to try and align those clicks with what your soul is doing.
And this is just true of the simplest things.
I mean, if I could go into your brain, and somebody probably could, and make you think it was raining, right, you would see rain.
You would have that click and there would be the rain.
But it wouldn't be raining.
People talk, I had Jordan Peterson on, and Peterson said, well, you know, it's no question in his intellectual way.
This is what intellectuals say.
They say, you know, there's no question that it's a value to people to have religious experiences.
And I said, yes, but the question is, does the religious experience relate to something real?
Does it relate to God?
And what you want to do is align the religious experience in your mind with the actual God on the other side of the veil, right?
And the same thing is true about sex and love and affection and care for somebody else.
You want to make sure that when those clicks go off, it's actually related to something human and deep and rich and soulful.
And that is part of the whole trick of life.
The news is constantly encouraging you to do the opposite.
Just like pornography, it's constantly encouraging you to have that click go off so that you have important conversations.
You know, who was a master of this?
Obama.
Obama brought up transgenderism and who should work, you know, who should use what bathrooms to distract from the fact that he had bobbled the Middle East.
He had set the Middle East on fire.
He had sat on the economy so that it was 1% growth for years and years and years and years.
He had bobbled everything, but oh, look over there, there's a transgender person using your daughter's bathroom.
There's a boy using your daughter's bathroom.
And we all did it.
We all went, oh, we were talking about this.
And when I would say to people, this has zero meaning.
It has zero meaning.
They would get offended.
They would get offended.
What are you talking about?
This would be molesting and people, this, you know, I'd say zero meaning.
It has zero meaning.
The only point here is that Barack Obama should not be, should not be talking about who uses a bathroom in Tennessee or anywhere else.
The way I always got around all this, the way I always got around the kind of pornographic effects of life was to imagine what would happen after the feeling passed, after the emotion passed.
So I have been in a highly paid worker in very glamorous businesses.
There were pretty girls around.
Sometimes these pretty girls would be available to me.
I have a family.
I have a wife that I adore.
I don't want to be stepping out on my wife.
And the way that I would get around the sensation, the temptation, the sudden urge that told me it was urgently important that I go off with this girl because she was beautiful and young and available, the way I would get around that is I would imagine what was going to happen after the experience was over.
And I would imagine, for instance, the look in my children's faces when I had to move out.
That'll kill your sexual desire in a big, big hurry.
So the people who are panicking over Roy Moore in Alabama, just imagine afterwards, afterwards, when you don't have the votes to pass the Trump agenda, when you don't have the votes for tax reform, when you don't have the votes for dialing back government, for rearranging entitlements and Obamacare, it's not going to be so much fun.
You can always get rid of Roy Moore, but it's going to be much harder to get rid of, I think, get rid of a Democrat if you elect him.
So just to show you that only one side, ask yourself this question.
Is the other side fighting Roy Moore because they want to keep a sex pest out of the Senate?
No, they're fighting Roy Moore for power.
They see an opportunity.
I think Steve Bannon blew this.
He said he was going to start a revolution.
Mitch McConnell said, don't do it.
He should have listened to Mitch.
Mitch was right.
You know, and now they see an opportunity and they're going in to get the power.
And the people on the other side have to fight to keep our power because our power is cutting back the power of government.
Here's today's New York Times.
Remember yesterday I told you that Al Franken didn't really resign.
He announced his intention to resign, and that once Roy Moore lost, if Roy Moore lost, suddenly Al Franken would not be resigning.
Here is today's New York Times.
Let's take a trip to the op-ed page of the New York Times, or as we like to call it, Knucklehead Row.
So here is Zephyr Teachout, an associate professor of law at Fordham.
I'm not making her name up.
And she writes, I'm not convinced Franken should quit.
This is the lead editorial on the op-ed page of the New York Times.
I care passionately about me too.
Women are routinely demeaned, dismissed, discouraged, and assaulted.
Too many women's careers are stymied or ended because of harassment and abuse in politics where I have worked much of my adult life.
This behavior is rampant.
I also believe in zero tolerance.
And yet, a lot of women I know, myself included, were left with a sense that something went wrong last week with the effective ouster of Al Franken from the United States Senate.
He resigned.
He did not resign, but he resigned, she says, after a groundswell of his own Democratic colleagues called for him to step down.
Zero tolerance should go hand in hand with two other things, due process and proportionality.
Now, the New York Times, when Betsy DeVos rescinded Obama's letter, which essentially squelched due process for men in universities, they didn't care very much about due process at all.
They ridiculed her commitment to due process on this very same page.
But suddenly, due process matters and proportionality.
Yeah, he just grabbed the woman's butt.
We still want Al Franken's vote.
In other words, it's a scam.
It's all one-sided.
It is all pornography bent on making you lose power, lose the power to cut back the government.
So then now they have the women, and we obviously know who the real target here is always, it's always the same target, PDD, PTD, President the Donald, is always the target here.
So now the women are coming out.
And these are women who were part of a documentary, by the way, attacking Trump, and they're basically promoting their documentary.
They came out yesterday saying that all the terrible things that Trump had done to them.
About 12 years ago, as a young receptionist in Trump Tower, I was forcibly kissed by Mr. Trump during our first introduction.
Mr. Trump repeatedly kissed my cheeks and ultimately my lips in an encounter that has since impacted my life well beyond the initial occurrence and feelings of self-doubt and insignificance I had.
Unfortunately, given Mr. Trump's notoriety and the fact that he was a partner of my employers, not to mention the owner of the building, I felt there was nothing I could do.
Given this hostile work environment, my only solution at the time was to simply avoid additional encounters with him.
I do realize that in the grand scheme of things, there are far worse cases of sexual harassment, misconduct, and assault.
But make no mistake, there is no acceptable level of such behavior.
That some men think they can use their power, position, or notoriety to demean and attack women speaks to their character, not ours.
Call For Accountability00:03:25
I just want to show you how brilliant Trump is on dealing with this, however, because he really is.
Kirsten Gilibrand, the senator who's leading this charge, although she defended Clinton, suddenly she thinks she's onto something, so now she's calling for an investigation.
This is the plan.
It's just a power play that is using, is utilizing your pornographic thrill.
It is utilizing your pornographic thrill as a power play.
That's all you're watching here.
You're watching news pornography, making you excited so they can get more power.
So here she is talking, and just watch how Trump's response to this is brilliant.
President Trump should resign.
These allegations are credible.
They are numerous.
I've heard these women's testimony, and many of them are heartbreaking.
And President Trump should resign his position.
Whether he will ever hold himself accountable is something you really can't hold your breath for.
And so Congress should have hearings.
They should do their investigation.
They should have appropriate investigations of his behavior and hold him accountable.
So you are standing by your prominent senator colleagues, Senator Corey Booker and others, who have called today for the president to resign.
I hear you very clearly agreeing with them.
Do you think, though, that there should be, as these women have called for, a bipartisan investigation?
Or are you calling for an immediate resignation?
I think he should immediately resign.
And if he doesn't, we should have the investigation.
So now Trump, just, you've got to look at it.
People say that Trump is just doing this stuff by accident.
It's not so.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
So now Trump tweets, lightweight, lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer, and someone who would come to my office begging for campaign contributions not so long ago and would do anything for them, is now in the ring fighting against Trump, very disloyal to Bill and Crooked.
Hillary, all right?
So that's the, now he says he's begging for campaign contributions and would do anything for them, right?
Now, it just obviously, to those of us of pure heart and sound mind, it's just he's just referring to political favors.
But immediately, Elizabeth Warren tweets back.
She says, are you really trying to bully, intimidate, and slut shame Senator Gillibrand?
So she is accepting that she went in there and was willing to do sexual favors.
They immediately went for the sexual thing.
Let's play the Mika attack on Morning Joe.
She just plays it as if it's obvious that he's talking about sexual favor.
Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer, and someone who would come to my office begging for campaign contributions not so long ago and would do anything for them is now fighting against Trump.
Very disloyal to Bill and crooked.
Used.
Exclamation point.
Okay, so I just want to say something beyond the fact that that is reprehensible that the President of the United States would say something so derogatory and disgusting about a woman.
I'm not surprised, Mr. President.
Upside Business Trip Benefits00:03:05
You do it all the time.
You treat women terribly, and you treat the women around you even worse.
And you treat women like punching bags because it's fun for you because you are intimidated by women.
That's your problem, okay?
But for the people who work for you, you need to act.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, good luck today in the briefing.
Don't lie and do not defend the President of the United States for what he did.
If you do, you should resign.
Evil to him who evil thinks.
They just basically, they went to the sex place, but Trump never did.
He never did.
They just went there and they're basically saying, they're basically condemning this woman, Kirsten Gillibrand, for having gone in and offered Trump sex.
I mean, Trump is like, he's a genius at this.
He really is.
And he's got the press so crazy they've made an utter fool of themselves.
And we'll get to that in just a minute.
But first, first, I am walking out of here and going to the airport.
And I have to say, you know, the people who have arranged my travel have done a wonderful job and they're picking me up and they're doing all this.
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Ben Shapiro's Guests Question Trump00:14:42
over so Trump keeps pulling the same trick on these guys where he leads them into doing you know he calls them fake news They get so upset, they try to destroy him.
They actually commit acts of fake news.
They've just made so many mistakes.
Their mistake about this email thing where they say that Donald Trump Jr. got an email from WikiLeaks on September 4th, giving him a secret code to their leaked letters.
But in fact, it was September 14th when the letters were available to everybody.
So now, Jim Acosta, one of the silliest reporters at CNN, they're stupid reporters and silly reporters.
He goes after Sarah Huckabee Sanders about his dishonesty.
He's like, they're just emphasizing his dishonesty.
Here is Jim Acosta.
I'm sorry, that was just his soul speaking.
Well, let's hear his body speaking.
Can you cite a specific story that you say is intentionally false, that was intentionally put out there to mislead the American people?
Sure, the ABC report by Brian Ross, I think that was pretty misleading to the American people.
And I think that it's very telling that that individual had to be suspended because of that reporting.
I think that shows that the network took it seriously and recognized that it was a problem.
Jim?
If I may, though, I was going to ask a question about something else.
You used it on something else.
Sarah, if I may, Sarah, I'm going to ask you to ask me.
Keep moving, guys.
If I can ask about the other chance accusations.
I'm moving to a different Jim.
I'm sorry.
I know, but I didn't get a chance to ask the question that I wanted to ask, which is, Jim.
Jim, I'm going to say once and for all that I'm moving on to Jim Stenson, and I'm not taking another question from you at this point.
Splat.
I'm running out of time, but I want to just talk about this one thing that's really going on: how so much of this news, this pornography, is taking us away from the real news.
And I have to play this cut, this amazing cut.
Adam Schiff, who I really do feel is a Joe McCarthy-like figure, has been slandering Donald Trump.
And he went on the Tapper show over the weekend and said this amazing string of half-truths that he put together to make it sound sinister.
And this is what is really happening.
I want to play this and then read the real news.
I'll end with the real news and then we'll get to Jonah Goldberg.
Here's Adam Schiff.
Join Assange announces he's received stolen emails, which we know now came from the Russians.
And the Russians themselves start publishing the emails through these cutouts.
You then have Trump Jr. in private secret communication with Wikileaks.
So we have all of these facts in chronology.
You'd have to believe that these were all isolated incidents not connected to each other just doesn't make rational sense.
Now, can you prove beyond a reasonable doubt will be Mueller's question to answer that the Russians communicated the campaign that the way they were going to deliver the help they offered and that the campaign accepted was not by handing the emails directly over to the campaign, but by publishing them.
That will be up to Mueller, and we continue to try to fill in all of the missing pieces.
But we do know this.
The Russians offered help.
The campaign accepted help.
The Russians gave help, and the president made full use of that help.
And that is pretty damning, whether it is proof beyond a reasonable doubt of conspiracy or not.
Have you no stance of decency, sir?
Have long last.
Have you left no stance of decency?
I may have tacked that last bit on.
That was Joseph Welsh going after Senator McCarthy.
But Adam Schiff is Senator McCarthy.
He is a reincarnation of Senator McCarthy.
Everything he said there was unprovable.
They still don't know if it was Russia that hacked it.
He's accusing Trump for WikiLeaks having published letters, which is what they do.
That's all they do.
And somehow that implicates Trump.
And whenever Tapper would say, do you know of any instance where the Russians said we're going to do it this way?
We're going to do it through WikiLeaks.
Did he have any proof?
I can't comment.
I can't comment.
You know, that's an issue that we've been investigating.
Here is what we really know, okay?
And I'm reading this from Bill McGurn, but a lot of this reporting comes from Fox.
And Fox News has been doing the only real news about this stuff.
I'm reading Bill McGurn's column, but this comes from Fox.
Start with the lead.
This is what we know about the Mueller investigation and what has been going on in the deep state against Trump.
Start with the lead FBI agent, Peter Strzzok, who exchanged anti-Trump pro-Hillary text messages with his mistress, an FBI lawyer named Lisa Page, who was then also working for Mr. Mueller.
Andrew Weissman, the lead prosecutor, not only attended Mrs. Clinton's election night soiree, but turns out to have cheered an Obama holdover at the Justice Department, Sally Yates, for her refusal to carry out a presidential order.
Meanwhile, and this is what comes from Fox, we learn that a senior justice official, Bruce Orr, met with both Trump dossier author Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson during the 2016 campaign, and that his wife worked for Fusion GPS.
And now, Christopher Wray, I don't have time to play this, but Christopher Wray was stonewalling Congress last week as Jim Jordan was asking him, you know, did you use this fusion GPS thing, this nonsense tabloid news dossier?
Did you use it to get a FISA warrant?
You know, Trump can release all these documents if he wants.
He is the head law officer in the country.
He can release all these documents, and I really believe he should, because that's the real news.
The real news is the deep state, the swamp, is fighting back for its power, and it will use its swampy techniques, including engaging you in pornographic news, to get you not to pay attention to the fact that they are trying to take over your life.
Jonah Goldberg, really one of my favorite writers and one of the best.
He is just a terrific writer.
He is the senior editor at National Review.
He writes columns for the Los Angeles Times.
He's the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Liberal Fascism, which I say this in the interview, is an epoch-making book.
You should read it.
It changes everything.
It's the secret history of the American left from Mussolini to the politics of meaning.
He also wrote The Tyranny of Clichés, How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.
He's a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, just a great writer and a good guy.
Here is my interview with Jonah Goldberg.
Oh, good.
This is like talking to a bond villain now.
That's the look I'm going for.
If you say anything wrong, if I say anything wrong, I'll disappear in like a shower of sparks and my chair will go into the floor.
I expect you to die.
So as I will have already said kind of unctuously when I introduce you, I have always found you one of the very best political writers in the country.
I think you are, first of all, you're a terrific writer.
And your book, Liberal Fascism, I think was epoch-making, as I told you at the time.
But you are now in a position, a really interesting position, vis-a-vis the president of the United States.
And let's start with the National Review Against Trump issue, which came out with this big against Trump and some of the biggest names in the conservative movement.
Are you sorry that happened?
Do you think that was a mistake, or you're fine with it?
Rich Lowry would be a better person to ask about that.
And I do think that it gets misunderstood.
It was partly my idea, but I don't call the shots at NR.
Rich does.
Or at least he thinks he does.
But I think that I think historically it will redound to our benefit.
I think it gets misunderstood by a lot of people who call it the never Trump issue.
There are lots of people who contributed to it who were, in fact, became sort of Trump supporters, at least I believe there are.
It came out on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.
So it was before a single vote had been cast.
And the reaction to it, I have to say, was not the best moment for a lot of people.
I was amazed by how many people, colleagues and friends of mine on Fox News, would say things like, how dare the National Review try to tell voters who to vote for?
And like, what do you think political magazines do?
I mean, what do you think an endorsement is?
And so it was very interesting as sort of a die marker about the populist moment when it came out, where we got lumped in with these outrageous elites in the establishment trying to tell people what to think when that's actually sort of been part of National Review's mission for the better part of 60 years.
Not to tell people what to think, but to make arguments for a certain position.
So I don't know.
I think you can make the case corporately that it was a mixed bag and alienated a lot of people.
I'm perfectly willing to defend it on blue in the face on the grounds that what we were in effect doing was endorsing the field against Donald Trump.
And I don't see anything as a major intellectual or philosophical or journalistic criteria that says that was a bad idea.
It might have been bad marketing.
It might have pissed off a lot of people.
But I'm fine with all that.
So where do you stand now?
Now we're a year in.
You're looking at the Trump administration.
What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, I'm fairly sympathetic to sort of the Ben Shapiro formulation, even though I don't use it much myself of, you know, good Trump, bad Trump.
I think that I don't, to the consternation of a lot of people, I don't use the term never Trump anymore because I think it's meaningless once the guy gets elected.
And as I wrote the day after the election, I was actually in a shockingly good mood because, first of all, Hillary Clinton wasn't president, which is just awesome.
And at the same time, I tend to call myself a Trump skeptic, which I remain.
And And I think that Trump has done a lot of good things.
Court picks are great.
I think some of the regulatory stuff is really good.
Some of it is overhyped if you look at the specifics.
I think some foreign policy stuff has been pretty good.
But I'm also someone who believes in the importance of rhetoric in the classical sense of shaping how people think about important issues.
And I think on those sorts of things, not just the Twitter account, but obviously that's the best example of it.
But on that sort of front, I think he's been very damaging to the conservative brand, to the Republican cause.
I don't care that much about the Republican Party.
I was never much of a team party guy.
I'm very proud of calling myself a conservative.
And I think long term, I think he has done significant damage to both brands.
Okay, so let's talk about that because I have to say that I was, first of all, like everybody, completely taken aback by his victory.
I had the exact same reaction that you had that I was stunned at how happy I was in the moment.
I mean, I thought it was a victory.
There was no question.
And I wonder if maybe victory doesn't look like what we thought it looked like.
So, for instance, let's talk about the Twitter and whether he's damaging the brand.
People like us keep saying, well, he's doing it.
I like a lot of what he's doing, but that Twitter account, but maybe what he's doing and the Twitter account are all one thing.
Maybe we're missing something that he sees that we don't.
Is that possible?
It's possible.
I'm very skeptical of that.
I think any attempt to fit Trump's actions into some grand vision of governing or philosophy of politics, any of that kind of stuff, is a classic example of intellectuals wanting to impose meaning on generally chaotic events.
And I don't think Trump is motivated by some overarching philosophy about almost, not entirely nothing, but almost nothing.
I think he's, you know, he had the same view.
He's had the same views, wrong views by my lights about trade for the last 30 years, and he's consistent on that.
I think the way he talks about national interest in America first is bad.
But I think that both hardcore Trump supporters and hardcore sort of Trump resistance people who I think have behaved stupidly want him to have some grand, want there to be some more meat to Trumpism than his own sort of glandular lizard brain in the moment actions.
And we've seen that there's very little to Trumpism without the persona of Trump himself.
Bannon tries to make it into something, and whatever he's trying to make it into, I think is garbage and nasty and bad for the country and bad for conservatism.
But there's a reason why Bannon was fired.
It was because he was actually trying to hold a consistent line on something.
The guys like Julius Kreins, I ever pronounce his name, they very much wanted to have an intellectual forum to defend Trumpism, not necessarily Trump.
And it turns out you can't because eventually your loyalties are torn between a coherent ideological agenda and his actual actions.
And since Trump, as a matter of philosophy and psychology, cannot stick to a coherent ideological line beyond his own sort of cult of self-personality, you either have to choose between an ideological agenda or loyalty to the man himself.
And I think we've seen that over and over again.
Now, let me go back to something you said because one useless, meaningless argument that I've been making for years is that the conservatives don't pay enough attention to the culture.
And when you said the America first thing is bad, it's damaging.
When I watch Trump with the NFL, for instance, I think he's doing something actually important.
It goes up my spine as a coastal elite.
It goes right up the back of my neck.
But why should we accept, I mean, every country has its games.
They always are a place for patriotism and for national unity.
Why should we accept people disrespecting the flag?
Obviously, they have the right to do it, and nobody's challenging that.
But why shouldn't the president come out and dismiss that and attack that?
Isn't that a good thing for the country?
Oh, look, I agree with him largely on the merits of the issue.
I Can't Help Feeling00:06:50
And if he were a Fox News pundit saying those things, I would agree with him almost entirely, I think.
But he's not that.
He's the president of the United States.
And one of the things that I think is valuable at sports, and I am perfectly willing to concede that Kaepernick and those guys went first, right?
I mean, they're the ones who initially made the problem, is that it's supposed to be a safe harbor from politics.
And one of the things I do not like, one of the things I've argued from liberal fascism and before and onward and ever since, is that I think politics should be a very small part of our lives.
And by joining that battle, when it was basically dying, right?
I mean, the kneeling stuff was on its way out.
You may agree with him on the merits.
I think what he did was actually damage the NFL.
And he did it for reasons that had more to do with wanting to be in the news, wanting to be in the headlines again, capture everybody's attention, and distract from other storylines, which I don't think is the most laudable process, and I don't think, or reasoning or motive.
And I don't think it, and what it served to do was actually politicize these institutions even more and sports more.
You know, I can't help feeling, though, that he has this feel.
I mean, he was a TV star for 10 years.
I can't help feeling that he has this feel for certain things that maybe more thoughtful people don't.
You know, he reminds me a little bit of Randall Patrick McMurphy, the hero of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who really is not a good person.
He's a brawler.
He's kind of a thug.
If you met him in real life, you probably wouldn't like him very much.
But he comes into a system of soft oppression that I think would have been locked in place by a Hillary Clinton victory.
And maybe we needed a ruffian a little bit to break that up.
Is that possible?
Sure, that's possible.
And again, I don't think that everything he's done, even on the football stuff, has been an unalloyed evil or bad thing.
I just have a very hard time ascribing to him motives of some grander ideological agenda other than himself.
And when you say, you know, what you're offering sounds like a version of, you know, I find this all the time.
Well, I'll meet Republicans who will say, well, you know, maybe the tweeting is really working for him.
And I was like, okay, well, give me some metric of that, right?
He's got the lowest approval ratings in the history of polling.
He has galvanized opposition to him.
He's making it harder for Republicans to actually carry out his agenda.
I mean, for instance, I mean, this gets to the point about the lizard brain thing.
If you vote with Donald, vote for Donald Trump's agenda in the House and the Senate, but criticize him verbally, the Baninistas will destroy you.
Trump will go after you.
But if you screw with his agenda, actually do something real to thwart his agenda, but suck up to him, they lavish you with praise.
Ben Sas and Corker and even Flake vote consistently with the Trump agenda, and they're being essentially pelted from the party to one extent or another and from conservatism.
Meanwhile, Rand Paul has probably single-handedly done more to undermine the Trump agenda in Congress than anybody else.
But because he sucks up to him in public, he gets no grief from anybody.
What's his name?
Zeldon just voted against the tax bill, which is hugely important for Republicans, for Trump's legacy.
It's the only shot he has of having a single major legislative accomplishment in his first year.
And so when Zelda voted against it, Paul Ryan canceled a fundraiser with him on the grounds of sort of trying to impose discipline and whip the caucus into supporting the Trump agenda.
And what does Bannon and his team do?
They rush in to throw a fundraiser for him because for them, anything that hurts the establishment is bad, even when the establishment is the one carrying the water for Donald Trump.
Mitch McConnell has done more for Donald Trump's legacy than Steve Bannon has.
He's the one who got Gorsuch on there.
He's the one who's greenlighting all of these judges.
But because Bannon has this idea the establishment is bad and Trump basically just wants sycophants, you get this cockeyed, absolutely moronic approach to the legislative agenda.
And so I have a hard time squaring that with competing claims that, oh, he's this 4D chess player he's trying to work in.
He has some grand strategy to all this.
I think he lives in the moment and he listens to the people who have his ear and he doesn't want to get crosswise with Bannon for cynical political reasons.
He's supporting Roy Moore, who I think, even if he wasn't an accused child molester, I think would be catastrophic, is going to be catastrophic for the Republican brand.
I think, you know, I wrote that conservatives should be denouncing him before any of these accusations came out because I think he's a theocratic bigot and a crank and a grifter.
But it's kind of more on Bannon than it is on Trump, right?
I mean, Bannon went in and promoted him when Trump was against him.
And now he's stuck wanting that vote.
He's got to get that vote in the Senate.
Yeah, no, that's all fine.
And I think you can actually, I mean, I'm far more sympathetic to Trumpism.
Right.
Because I think it's more harmless in a lot of ways than Bannonism.
But at the same time, he's the president of the United States.
He's the head of the party.
He's the guy who hired this guy and gave him a profile.
And so at some point, it's on him.
I mean, FDR had lots of people that he used to build his coalition and pit factions against factions.
But that was because he was actually a chess player.
I don't think Trump is a chess player.
You know, I have a lot more to ask you, but I'm almost out of time.
Let me ask you this one last question.
If you could connect the dots into the unknowable future where you get the best Trump outcome so that four years from now we have, you know, it's just exactly what you would have wanted from this moment.
What would that look like?
I don't know that that can be salvaged at this point.
If you look at the number of Republicans who no longer call themselves Republicans just simply since 2016, if you look at the unbelievably hard feelings among millennials who are going to be or now a bigger demographic than the baby boomers, you know, baby boomers are dying out, literally.
Last Question00:04:17
Right.
And politics is supposed to be about addition, not subtraction.
And so I think a lot of the damage to the brand has been done.
That said, look, if the tax bill, which I think is possible, leads to a big economic boom, I'm in favor of cutting the corporate tax rate.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
You could see the economy going well and Trump plausibly taking some credit for it.
A lot of this has to do with how he responds to North Korea and all of these kinds of things.
His legacy on the judiciary, I think, is as good as any other Republicans would have been, and in some ways, maybe even better.
I do think that that's in part because he doesn't care about it and just basically outsources it to the Federalist Society.
But I think it's entirely possible that we'll look back four years later and say there's been a lot of progress.
But I don't think it's possible to say that there hasn't been a lot of damage.
Interesting.
Jonah, thanks so much for coming on.
I hope you come back.
I have a lot more things I want to interrogate.
I'm happy to do it.
All right.
Tell you what, I'll have you on my podcast and we do the same thing for an hour.
Excellent.
I'll be there.
Jonah Goldberg, really one of my favorite writers.
You should subscribe to his newsletter at NRO.
It's always really, really entertaining.
All right, sexual follies.
So, you know, it's been a while since we've gone to our favorite website, Everyday Feminism.
You know, we used to go once a month.
Now we're getting a little older.
It doesn't happen all the time.
One day, I guess it'll just completely close off.
But here is a post on Everyday Feminism: 10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask on a First Date by Lara Witt.
10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask on a First Date.
And she begins as a queer femme of color.
And one of the things I love about intersectional, I have no idea what these people are.
I don't know what a queer femme is that like a man who thinks he's a woman who's white, but is actually behaves black.
You know, you just have no clue, but then who sleeps with, I have no idea.
But she says, I keep close relationships with people who go beyond allyship.
That's the other thing.
They have all this jargon.
They're true accomplices in the fight against white supremacy, queer phobia, and misogyny.
If you're not going to support marginalized folks, then we can't be friends, let alone date.
The personal is political.
Beyond the lovely cushioning happiness and support that we receive from our platonic relationships, feminists also date.
Who would have ever thought?
But there are questions we have to ask before we get close to someone.
The following list of questions is applicable to all relationships, certainly not just cisgender, heterosexual ones.
So let's pretend we were on a date with this battle axe and answer her 10 questions that she's going to ask us.
Question one, do you believe black lives matter?
Answer, yes, but I think it's okay to be white.
Actually, I think it's great.
It's superb.
You can't believe how good it is to be white.
I wish everyone could try it.
Question number two: What are your thoughts on gender and sexual orientation?
Answer, basically, if you weren't born with a vagina, I'm not paying for dinner.
Question three: How do you work to dismantle sexism and misogyny in your life?
Answer, whenever women speak to me, I pretend to listen.
Then I pretend what they said makes sense.
Question four: What are your thoughts on sex work?
Answer, if it's work, you're doing it wrong.
Question five, are you a supporter of the BDS movement?
That depends.
If that means you want me to tie you up, I'm in.
If it means you hate Jews, I'm against it, but I'd still be willing to tie you up.
Question six: What is your understanding of settler colonialism and indigenous rights?
That depends on whether you want to use every part of the buffalo or order Chinese food on your iPhone.
Question seven, do you think capitalism is exploitative?
Answer, I'll tell you after we get the check.
Question eight, can any human be illegal?
Answer, absolutely not, but some can be divorced.
Question nine, do you support Muslim Americans and non-Muslim people from Islamic countries?
Answer, no, because they keep blowing stuff up.
Question 10, does your allyship include disabled folks?
Answer, absolutely, as long as they don't get on my nerves.
Dreaming White Christmas00:02:04
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Answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
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