The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Trump defies all norms and a civil war on the right takes centre stage

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Rudyard and Janice begin today's show unpacking Trump's increasingly erratic behaviour. A Truth Social post attacking Rob Reiner was followed by the Trump appointed board voting to add his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Topping this off was a video of a new hallway of portraits in the White House featuring past U.S. presidents and plaques with Trump's personal commentary of these leaders. As we piece all these events together, is it fair to assume we are witnessing a certain type of senility and mental decline in the 47th U.S. President? And what does the Vanity Fair interview with his Chief of Staff Susan Wiles reveal about how he conducts himself behind closed doors? In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice turn to the growing civil war in the GOP, specifically an edgier version of MAGA that embraces conspiracies and populist nationalism led by the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. There is a power struggle over which ideology should reign supreme in the party and another conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, has stepped forward to denounce this growing white nationalist faction. Who wins and who loses in this scenario? How does JD Vance's political ambitions fit into this changing political landscape? And why has anti-semitism become the breaking point between these two factions?  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Friday Focus Podcast for the 19th of December, 2025. I'm Rudyard Griffith, joined in studio by Janice Gross Stein. Janice, our second last show of the year. I think this is our 51st or 50th episode in 2025. We're going to have a special end-of-year episode next week. But this week, wow, we've got a lot to talk about. And I think we want to focus exclusively on the United States.

It's two big sets of developments. First, some very erratic behavior with the president that we can go through on the beginning of the show. And then for our monk members on the back half, we want to talk about a big cat fight that's broken out in American conservatism. And it suggests, you know, some big stakes possibly for Canada in terms of where this American conservative movement heads. You know, I get out myself, both of these stories are uniquely American at this moment. moment in history, never really seen anything quite like this. Yeah, and that's exactly why we like on this show to kind of bring people what we think is a kind of synthesis of the week to try to link some things together.

So here I'm going to link three things quickly together for you and then you can comment on it. The week opened with, for our YouTube listeners, YouTube viewers, this bizarre tweet from the president. We all heard about it, brutally attacking Rob Reiner, the filmmaker of many great films, including one of my favorites, Princess Bride, he was murdered tragically by his son, and the president basically danced on his grave. That was earlier in the week. As the week went on, the Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center renamed the Kennedy Center. Wasn't Trump's idea, of course not. The Trump Kennedy Center, Joe Kennedy, one of the descendants of the Kennedy family, said the Kennedy Center

was named after a president who died in the line of duty. And as we end out the week, news reports, and again, for our YouTube listeners, I really suggest let's drill down into this photograph. News reports that the president has assembled a kind of walk of, I want to say fame, but it's a kind of walk of shame that he has selected portraits of American presidents, including himself, of course,

but more importantly, he has written in his, his true social style of all caps tweets, his own interpretation of himself and his predecessors. This is in a prominent location in the White House. Janice, I just put all these events together, the Rob Reiner obscenity early in the week, this craven act of self-engendizement renaming the Kennedy Center, the Trump Kennedy Center, And then maybe most disturbing of all, these reports of this new kind of portrait gallery that the president has assembled with these blatant and egregious attacks on his predecessors. There isn't even a picture of Joe Biden. There's a picture of an auto pen signing Joe Biden's signature.

We've speculated Janice on the show over many months now that the president's condition was deteriorating. We weren't sure why or how or when. I have a feeling this week that something has culminated. You know, I've never seen anything like this wall that you've just described, Richard. You know, just to linger on it for a minute because the visuals of it are just frankly astonishing to line up all the past presidents in a kind of rogue's gallery. and there's gold on top of the wall, right? And then two portraits of Donald Trump himself,

with his kind of writing, self-describing his greatness, an auto pen, as you say, for Joe Biden. And, you know, as you go down this wall, you think, frankly, this is deranged. There's no question about it. Anybody looking at this would say there's something really, gone wrong here, this is off. So that has to be deeply worrying.

But the people around him who framed these portraits, who did the layout. And if you look at the layout, Richard, Donald Trump's portraits are higher up on the wall. And there's something, I think, if we got a medical expert to look at this, and they were asked for judgment,

they would say something is really off. Yeah. This is not anything like normal territory. And you add that to the Rob Reiner tweet. It's just so against his own political interest to attack someone who was killed in their home with their wife by their presumably ill son, Rob Reiner, a much beloved director.

Yes, he was a critic of the president. There's a lot of critics of the president. And to dance on his grave. and then you put it together, you know, with, again, this endless need for sycophancy on the part of his appointees at the Kennedy Center. Again, as Joe Kennedy pointed out, named after a president who died in the line of duty. I lived, you know, as a younger person, I visited like you, Washington many, many times, been to the Kennedy Center. And it is a fitting tribute to a remarkable president who, again, died in the line of duty. and to deface that honoring of John F. Kennedy's sacrifice by sticking your own name in front of his.

And then this bizarre, again, portrait gallery that he's assembled, Janice, you just have to wonder, like, are we seeing something here, which is, you know, some pronounced symptom of senility? And, you know, a certain type of senility, a senility that I think many of us have recognized in people we know and some people that we love, that when someone is slipping into different types of dementia, these types of exaggerated behaviors and needs that are not in their own interests that are so contrary to how they're expected to behave, yet they have these compulsions to be. behave in this way, you just have to wonder if something hasn't started to happen here that might be quite serious. You know, look, as I said, you know, I have no medical expertise, but you look at this and, you know, something's really, really wrong here. Just to describe for our listeners, because we really do, we'll put a link in the show notes so you can go and look at this. It's not simply that the portraits are framed in gold or that the present has decided that his tweet-like writing is cast in bronze underneath, he's attached kind of,

again, these home hardware style kind of gold plaster, I don't know what you'd even call them. Ornamentation. Ornamentation all over the walls. Like it looks, it looks obsessive. It looks like something that a mentally ill person would do. And would think was beautiful. or would just be, again, unable to perceive reality as it was being presented. Recently, the Monk debates hosted a fascinating debate about the two-state solution. But 90 minutes on this contentious topic can also barely scratch the surface. After all, Israel is a hotbed of conflicting ideologies, identities, interests, and historical narratives. Even for experts, that's a lot to keep up with.

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So if you're ready to go deeper, find me on Call Me Back wherever you get your podcasts. See you there. That's essentially what this is. This is disconnected from any reality. Then anybody from the Republicans, the Democrats across the spectrum would recognize. Now, look, Roger, it's not you and me that is saying Sarah was an interview. by Susie Wiles. This week.

This week, right? Which, again, you know, she's his chief of staff, super loyal to Trump, arguably made his presidency because she brought some discipline. She was the campaign manager, yeah. That's right. And without her, his campaign might have flown apart. And she's the chief of staff in the White House. And she gave an interview to Vanity Fair.

15 interviews over months. I don't know. I think she thought those were. you know, locked in a drawer until the presidency was over. I have a different theory, but keep going. Because otherwise, why would you do it? But what she said was he has an alcoholic's personality, even though he's not an alcoholic.

He's a teetotaler, yeah. Yeah. What does that mean? Out of control. And she used the word obsessive, right? You know, out for vengeance. and if he sees an opportunity, he'll go for it. And she couldn't stop him.

She describes episode after episode of that kind of behavior, even while she's saying she walked it back this week after they were released. But when you read that description, this is a man gripped by his own demons that nobody not even his most trusted aid can ring men. It's astonishing. I think she gave those interviews because I think she'll be gone in the next, early in the new year. And I think it's a pattern that many people who work with Trump try to do to save their own reputations. They try to create a record when they are working for him about why they, in her case, she said they tried, she tried to stop the tariff.

She didn't support the tariff. She tried to curtail some of the ice excesses on immigration. She claims that even on the Kennedy Center tried to weigh in there. I think she's a wily political operator of her own, and I think she's trying to create a backstory that allows her to have some kind of career post-Trump, where she can say, you know, maybe I wasn't John Kelly, maybe I wasn't Mattis,

you know, those kind of storied military officers who stepped into the breach and very imperfectly tried to act as Trump's, you know, senior advisors or chiefs of staff. I think she's trying to save her own bacon. You know, you make great sense here, Roger, because you can't make sense of a story of why she would give 15 interviews

and talk about her boss. To vanity fair of all things. Not exactly a MAGA outlet. No. But if you're right, boy, that makes a lot. lot of sense to me. If she goes, that White House flies apart. She is the glue that, because she talked about JD Vance as well and the trouble that she's had raining in JD Vance. She called him a

conspiracy. She said he's been obsessed with conspiracies for the last decade. Yeah. So what comes out of these two, of these descriptions? And if she's laying track to go, she's probably telling it more or less like it is. Both of these men in their own way. are obsessives. Yeah. And if you're obsessive, there's no controlling it.

It's really, frankly, frightening. But just as we end the same, let me just try to push this a little bit. There's one thing to be obsessive, but again, and if you're listening to this, go to the show notes, there'll be a link there to look at a photograph

of this wall that the president's created of all of his past portraits, past incumbents of the Oval office. We'll have it up on the screen right now for our YouTube viewers. This, Janice, to me, does, this doesn't look like simple obsessiveness. This looks like, again, some kind of mental deterioration where you go beyond obsession into the beginnings of madness. Because again, it's just so bizarre and it's so, again, contrary to his own. interest, his popularity is falling, his polling numbers are down, Americans feel increasingly

uncertain about his leadership precisely because he has been so erratic over the last number of months, why would he do something like this, which would then just be a confirmation of everyone's worries, all those voters that he needs with the midterm elections coming up in less than a year? You know, I think it's so interesting when you look at this wall, and I'm absolutely trying to fix my head. It's over. And you know, there's Ormalu. Go down, when the viewers go look at this, look along the hall, you'll see these Ormolu decorations.

And even under the windows, you notice as it goes on, he's covered literally. He's covering everything in gold. Yeah. It's an obsession with covering things in this. But you have to ask yourself when you finish reading, and maybe we can find a link to her interview, too, to Susie Wilde's interview. You have to ask yourself, if something happens to this president, Because presidents can be declared under the Constitution mentally unfit,

but somebody in his team would have to take the initiative. And she's certainly an obvious candidate, if you're right. It's an arguable who would be more dangerous. An unraveling Donald Trump or a focused, obsessive, shady vets. Don't pop the champagne corks, anybody. Yeah. Well, look, we don't wish anyone ill. No, no.

But this is something is happening here. And I don't know how sustainable it is, Janice. Well, there are huge risks. There are huge risks. Let's remember again, just for a moment, Roger. We are talking about the president of the United States, who is the single decision maker on nuclear weapons. One, other countries have to,

or three, not in the United States. He's the single decision maker. He will decide what kind of force is used against Venezuela if and when force is used. So the stakes are just enormous when you're talking about the present of the United States. Okay, well, let's take goodbye to our complimentary listeners and viewers. We do have to wish everybody Merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year. Exactly. And happy Hanukkah to all of our Jewish listeners and viewers, too. Let's reconvene on the other side of the break. We're going to keep on the topic of the United States.

There's a kind of Donnybrook, civil war that's breaking out within American conservatism. I don't even know if it's conservatism anymore. It's kind of American populist nationalism. I think it has big implications for Canada and what happens next. We're going to break that down exclusively for our monk donors after this short break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast. To get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program, simply go to our website, www.w. The monkdebates.com.

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