The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Debates Podcast: Gaza, tariffs, and a constitutional showdown

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle and Vox senior correspondent Zack Beachamp unpack President Trump's plans for Gaza, closing USAID, and what we can expect from a constitutional showdown between this administration and the courts. The host of this Munk Dialogue is Rudyard Griffiths To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome 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.

There's a lot of evidence that people care about democracy at a bedrock level. Educated professional, political elites tend to really overestimate how committed people are to democracy or to procedure or to any of the rest of it. They're not. Hi, Monk listeners. Welcome to this, our regular podcast series on politics and culture, featuring two thoughtful and informed guests with very different points of view. It's what we do best here at the Monk debates, offering competing viewpoints on the big issues of the day, hopefully to bring more balance and nuance to our highly polarized debates. Our guest today are Megan McCartle and Zach B-Cham.

Megan is a calmist at The Washington Post, whose work focuses on the intersection of business, economics, and public policy. Zach is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, along with right-wing populism and the bigger, world of ideas. Megan, Zach, welcome to the Monk Debates. Oh, it's happy to be here. Yeah, it's wonderful. Well, lots of great feedback from our last show with you. People enjoyed the back and forth in the exchange of ideas. That's what the Monk Debates is all about. So again, great to have both of you participating in these regular podcasts. Well, let's dig into the news of this week and have you

unpack it for our listeners. I think what one story, of many that all of us are following is the unfolding rhetoric out of this president and his administration regarding the fate and future of Gaza. This is as we go to air today, reports that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has basically pulled the ceasefire and is resuming hostilities against Hamas. Megan, to what extent do you think the president's maybe ill-fated words about turning Gaza into a luxury resort in the Trump style is now the, you know, the midwife of this failed ceasefire and the seeming resumption of hostilities between Israel and Hamas?

The way I would put it is this, is that Trump, in his ham-fisted and silly way was trying to grapple with a really hard reality, which is that the... outcome that is acceptable to Hamas is the outcome that is completely unacceptable to Israel. Right. What does Israel want, aside from the hostages back? It wants Hamas out of power. What does Hamas want? The only thing they want, more than they care about Gaza civilians or whatever, they want to stay in power. And I am sympathetic to Israel's feeling that they cannot be safe, that the southern tip of their country cannot be occupied while there is a state that would do something like the October 7th attacks. And so I don't think, obviously, that Trump's solution

of U.S. takeover and conversion of Gaza into a luxury resort was the right solution to that problem. But I think the fact is no one knows what the right solution to that problem is no one can figure out any way to get to a ceasefire that does not, that ultimately break down over the same thing that these ceasefires have been breaking down over the whole time, which is Israel wants Hamas gone, Hamas does not want to be gone, and they are still running the negotiations. Well, Zach, one solution, I guess, that everyone had been talking about for years was a two-state solution, and some had hoped that possibly this conflict, out the other end of it, in one way, shape, or form would be a return to a conversation about a two-state solution and finding some kind of

resolution between Palestinians and Israelis, either in the context of the West Bank, Gaza, or some permutation of all the contested and disputed territories. That seems to have ended with President Trump. If he's done anything in the last seven days, it is to kill the two-state solution, is it not? Yes and no. I mean, first, I want to start with talking about this Trump plan as it actually is, because it's not a plan, right?

Like, the way that he has described it repeatedly is about getting the people who live in Gaza, all two million of them out. That's not like any kind of peace proposal. It's not any kind of normally tolerable proposal. It would be one of the largest acts of ethnic cleansing in history, in recorded history, in any event, in one fell swoop. It's almost astonishing that it's something that we even have to talk. I feel debased. I feel gross. As somebody who knows a lot of Israelis and Palestinians,

I've spent a lot of time reporting on the region. It feels gross. It feels wrong. It feels degrading to speak about this. Like it's some kind of normal policy option or idea in the conflict when in fact it's a war crime of astonishing proportions. But sort of setting aside the, I think the necessary outrage for the moment, the reminder that this kind of thing is coming from the most powerful person in the world.

It doesn't necessarily mean the two-state solution is dead. And the reason it doesn't is because the two-state solution is one of those things that, in some ways, can't really die. Like, this sounds maybe paradoxical, but it is at base an idea that because there are two people who have mutually irreconcilable desires for what to do with, you know, what the polity should look like, who should govern certain sets of territories, that you have to split it up after a certain point. And while the specific framework that we have used to guide two state negotiations since the 1990s, the one guided by the Oslo Accords, is in serious trouble,

the idea of political partition as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn't die because you have a president in the White House who's at end an Israeli leader who's hostile to it and a Palestinian leader in the West Bay, Mahmah Makhud Abbas, who's really not competent to deliver on it, that doesn't mean that the overall framework. is dead. It just means the prospects for it happening in the immediate future amount to nothing. But the immediate future is not the only future. I mean, Trump's presidency was unthinkable as recently as 2012. Well, let me come to Megan on this. So, Megan, do you have any hope that the two-state solution could be revived, that it could endure through this period,

through what are clearly, I don't know, based on the president's remarks and the reaction in the region, a kind of shock that has further polarized. the situation evidenced today by the breakdown of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas? I don't have a lot of hope for it, but not because of Donald Trump. Look, I think Donald Trump's idea of the Trump administration in general, their idea of how to solve the Middle East problem is you pick a winner, and that winner is Israel. I don't think that's a great solution, obviously, but I do think that that is their theory of the case. But of course, administration's changed. He's not going to be here forever. I think the larger problem for me when I think

about the two-state solution is two things. Number one is that for the Palestinians, every single conflict they go into, every single deal they negotiate, they're negotiating for something worse than what they had before. If you look at the partition plan that was proposed in the 1930s, it was better than what was proposed after World War II. If you look at the post-World War II partition, it was better than the post than after Arab countries went to war with Israel and you got the 1967 borders. This is in 1967 borders are now, we're now better than what the facts on the ground are with the settlements. And I think after October 7th, Israel is not going to give them more than was potentially on the table before they're going to get less.

And this is not to speak to the morality of the situation. It is to speak to the fact that Israel has proven that it can absolutely level where the Palestinians live if it wants to at high price to Israel at excruciatingly high price to the Palestinians, but they have gained power from this situation and the Palestinians have lost it, which means that the next deal that they go in to negotiate is going to be even worse than Oslo. And so I think realistically, that has always been a real sticking point, is who is the leader, who is the Michael Collins of the Palestinians, Michael Collins, the Irish terror leader, who then turned into a statesman negotiated home rule, which was less than his party wanted, but more than the best they could realistically get from the British in the 20s. And that eventually turned into full Irish independence. There is no leader like that on the Palestinian side. And part of the problem is that that leader would have to go and say, yeah, 50 years ago, we could have had X, but now I want to get you X minus four. And that is a really hard position. The other problem is that I don't see the Palestinian authority as having

the state capacity to give Israel security guarantees without Israel continuing to make military incursions and provide security assistance in the West Bank. And again, this is not a judgment on the justice of the Palestinian cause. It is just that realistically, they do not control their territory well enough to say, if you do a deal with us, if we separate, I can guarantee you 100 percent. There will be no more terrorism. They can't make that. that guarantee, and that makes Israel much less willing and interested in a settlement. So, Zach, last word for you on this topic before we move on to the next subject for the show. Where do we go from here? We've got a ceasefire that's broken down. We have a president who is

recently, as the last 24 hours, has dug in again on this idea of a forced eviction of the people of Palestinian origin in Gaza to Jordan. He's a meeting with. He's a meeting with. with King Abdullah, supposedly to, again, make this argument to Jordan and Egypt Sisi. Wow. I mean, we seem a long, long way from any kind of resolution here, don't we? Yeah. I mean, the problem is that the constellation of political actors in the immediate term is so poor for any kind of negotiated agreement or meaningful progress.

Nobody needs me to tell them that Donald Trump, the Hamas leadership, Benjamin Netanyahu and Makwina Abbas, is not a combination of personalities that is likely to incline one towards durable and sustained progress towards Israeli-Palestinian peace. If there's any hope to be found anywhere, my bet right now on where to find it is in domestic resistance to Netanyahu inside Israel. his numbers, all numbers had gone back up pretty strikingly after Israel's military successes against Tirana Hasbola last year. I suspect a broken down ceasefire and a return to war will deflate those somewhat and reignite a lot of popular energy. Saving the hostages has become a really important rallying cry among the Israeli population. And it's mobilized a significant amount of Israelis to sort of act in the oppositional manner to their government that we saw in of 2023, the mass protests against what was then called the judicial coup.

And I think in the absence of a durable and sustained pushback against the extreme right Netanyahuah coalition, it'll be very, very difficult to change the political dynamics to something more productive for all people involved. Because like right now, it's rough. It's really, really, really bad. Well, talking about rough, we got another topic for you. you. Tariffs, the tariff man has shown up. He gave us a big scare in Canada more than a week ago with a 25% levy on Canadian imports, Mexican also into the United States. That lasted all

of about 72 hours. So we were kind of lighter in our feet as the week went on. But we started this week with the return of the tariff man, Megan. He's come back and slapped big duties on. Canadian steel and aluminum, really all over the world, these tariffs will be applied equally. This is what I call a Washington issue, which is that a Washington issue is something that makes no difference, but it's something that can be explained in under 30 seconds on a broadcast. And you saw this under the Obama administration with things like the idea that Glass-Steagall, this 1930s-era law that had been repealed was the cause of the financial crisis. If you dug into it, this made no sense.

None of the rules that had been repealed, what you would expect to happen from the repeal. The opposite had happened. For example, you would have expected, they allowed investment banks and commercial banks to merge. If the repeal of Glass-Steagall had been the cause of this, you would have expected the problems to show up first in the big joint merger banks between the commercial and the investment banks. it actually turned up in the other. And tariffs are a similar issue, which is that you can go and you can say, look, we're going to protect our companies and we're going to make it so that people can't do unfair competition. And voters go, yeah, because they haven't actually read any economics on the topic. And they don't understand the reasons this don't work. It sounds very intuitive.

It just happens to be wrong. And so, and that's really, it's as simple as that. It's a good issue for him. and he is really, really, really enamored of it. And what he doesn't think about or what his voters don't think about is the fact that prices are going to go up and people are going to get mad. And it's not going to matter that you explain, it's actually not the tariffs and something else.

People are just going to get mad that the prices are higher in the same way that the Biden administration tried to blame inflation on all sorts of consolidation in the meatpacking industry or whatever. And it didn't matter because voters didn't care what was causing it.

They cared that prices were high. Yeah. So, Zach, where's the debate? I mean, you hear some dissenting voices, I guess, on Wall Street. The left, though, in America, to me, seems surprisingly quiet on this issue. Why is that? Is it because they themselves are a bit conflicted about tariffs? Why are we not hearing a more full-throated kind of defense of the benefits of, well, I wouldn't

ask for the benefits of free an open. markets necessarily from the left, but some sense that this is going to hurt consumers. This is probably going to hurt the people in America that can least afford high prices. Look, this is something that we on the left used to understand, and to which I say, return, return left, return to the 1990s when you understood what was good about trade. Because trade's good. It actually is very good. I co-signed what Megan said for once. We're agreeing here. But also, I mean, trade and immigration are two issues that have. similar political axes, right, that divide the normal groups against each other, right,

in that you used to have at least a large contingent of pro-immigration Republicans, centered in the business community, right, who saw the benefits of immigration for their industries. And liberals and the left were split in on trade for the same reason that sort of Republicans were internally spent on immigration. You had a group that saw trade as an important source of economic growth that could boost prosperity for everybody. And you also make the argument that I've made in print, which is that trade is particularly good for low and middle income countries. So if you care about global poverty and you care about equality, not just inside countries, but around the world, then supporting free trade should be one of

the, you know, your first priorities. But there's also a group that argued basically making sort of Trump-like arguments that, but focused on American workers and unions particularly, arguing that competition with foreign-made goods is what decimated the American workplace. And this argument was often extended to immigration, saying the competition with new workers is decimating American unionization and, in general, just depressing wages. I don't think any of those things are true. Right. That's just sort of the nature of what the case was. And the Biden administration had come awfully close to embracing, I mean, arguably fully, right, embraced and embodied this quote unquote post-neo-neoiberal.

pern among a certain segment of Democrats in the left that made this anti-trade and skepticism on immigration a sort of related package, what you might have in the past called a version of labor or labor leftism or labor liberalism, into its governing doctrine, right, with a lot of economic nationalism being, in many ways, the watchword, the administration's position through various different departments, right? This was also seen as an important foreign policy initiative in a lot of ways. that failed. A former top Democratic economic advisor, Jason Furman,

were a long-lease in foreign affairs that I'd recommend everybody, which is, I think, a just sort of devastating dissection of how this post-neoliberal turn, and particularly its turn on trade and protectionism, has been very, very bad for the priorities that the Democratic Party claims to care about. So, Megan, what's your instincts telling you? Is this, are these like opening salvo?

in a presidency that's in its kind of full flight, the early, early weeks of governing, can this endure? I mean, people did observe that his 25% tariffs on Mexican-Canada lasted all of 72 hours. To what extent is any of this going to stick around if there are pain points that emerge as youth are indicating they likely will

with American consumers and therefore vote? voters, does all of this just go away in a populist kind of myasm of crowd-pleasing and genuflection? I think it is foolish to try to predict what Trump will do because Trump is sui generous. He is not a normal politician. You know, normally when a president comes in, you have a basic sense of the lay of his advisors who's close to the president, who's not, what the priorities are.

and you don't really have any of that with Trump. You have a bunch of random stuff he's out on the campaign trail in no particular order, and he's going to try to do that. I think the thing he is most committed to right now is his war on the bureaucracy. As for the tariffs, I actually really don't know. Is he going to trim them back? I will say this, though, is that with Canada and Mexico, he had a victory condition. In the case of Canada, it was a really stupid victory.

He talked about we need to do this to stop the scourge of Canadian fentanyl, the 40 pounds of fentanyl that had been seized at the Canadian border in the past year and illegal migrants. And this is really dumb, right? We send more, generally we send more illegal border crossers and fentanyl to you than you send to us. But at least he had a thing that he could say, oh, well, Canada has a. assuaged my fears, they're cracking, they've appointed a fentanyl czar. We're ready, you know, the problem solved. And, you know, with the broader tariffs, it's hard to see what the, what the victory condition is that allows him to kind of back down, save face and say, I did it, and I got, I got a win. Yeah. Zach, last word for you, you're in Canada right now. So you're on

this side of the proverbial tariff. Well, in fact, I believe you're in a border community that, you know, has long and deep connections to the, the United States. To what extent do you think this is just, I don't know, it's breaking some big furniture here in North America. I certainly feel like the mood here in Canada in the last 10 days has changed, maybe parnimately, towards the United States, regardless of who the next president is. What kind of damage do you think is being done right now to, you know, some of America's closest relationships? I mean, I think it's hard to overstate. The most optimistic case, right, is maybe comparing things to the way they were in the early 2000s, right, in the Romty, Iraq War.

Canadians were, by and large, quite furious with the United States and the American handling of the war, and they're trying to bully them into supporting a war they didn't support. And that did inflame nationalism to a degree, but that didn't directly threaten Canada, right, in the sense that I get from, I mean, obviously, that we know the tariffs are threatening Canadians today. But more broadly, and I think more deeply, the American-led international order, the world that we've been living in for quite some time now, depends fundamentally on a perception that the United States is a reliable partner, right, in a sense that there's a certain level of continuity between administrations in its general approach towards the world that involves

a set of stable alliances, commitments to maybe not international law in every particular, but the idea of international law in broad strokes, hostility to a rise of any kind of global authoritarian rival and support for broadly speaking, again, often not in every specific or even many specific cases, but broadly speaking, the idea of a democratic community of nations sort of setting the tone, the global politics. All these ideas really depend on the sense that the U.S. is committed to the values embodied in the international system it created. And that sense, like, it wasn't broken after one Trump term among most places. I would talk to Europeans, Canadians, other people are in the Americas.

It was like, well, okay, this happened. Things can happen sometimes. It's fine. But with a second Trump term, there's a really deep sense that this might just be the future of what America is, right? That one of our political parties, fully half of the American, the sort of politically involved class, has moved over to a way of thinking about the world, about the global economy about the global political system that fundamentally opposed to what America claimed

to stand for in the bipartisan consensus days. And that that means other countries are going to start planning for what it looks like. And that doesn't mean like, you know, there's going to be a sundering of the NATO alliance tomorrow or that candidate and Canadian should worry about an invasion coming up, right? That's all overseated. But what is possible is that countries have to start making their own arrangements and being a little bit more self-reliant about thinking about a world where they can't outsource a lot of things to the United States. And that is a tremendous blow to American national power, right? A lot of the way the United States wielded power was by having other countries defer to it. But it also means that I think that we're going to have to reckon with a reality

that's been created by the choices of American voters and one that will long outlive Trump. Let's make it an all Trump show on our final time. I want to go to, in the moments that it remains, we'll have to be quick on this, but I want to go to a kind of anxiety that seems to be creeping into some press coverage in the last just few days regarding the Trump presidency and U.S. courts. There now have been a series of initial rulings on various plaintiff lawsuits and junctions against the Trump administration to stop a variety of different actions that it has underway. seems like, Megan, some early reporting today that some of these actions are not being abided by in terms of these court-ordered directions for, let's say, program spending to be unfrozen. How concerned are you that we could be on the cusp of some bigger kind of constitutional showdown between the administration and the courts? And what would that mean? Is that consequential?

Or is that just another bump in the road of the Trump presidency of which there will be many more to come? It would be tremendously consequential. And I think that there is a very good chance we are headed to a constitutional crisis where Donald Trump is told by a court to do something. And he just says, okay, send your cops, court. Send your army. Go ahead and try to enforce this. You can't make me. I tend to think that that would not end well.

for the Trump administration. Not so much, actually, because I think the American people have a deep and abiding commitment to a constitutional process. I think they don't. I think people educated professional political elites tend to really overestimate how committed people are to democracy or to procedure or to any of the rest of it. They're not. They have intuitive feelings about how things should come out.

and when the process is at odds with the intuitive outcome that they think should result, they get very hostile to the process. And you can explain all you want why the process is good and necessary, but I think this is a general and longstanding feature of politics. And you saw this in the Biden administration too, where the Biden administration really wanted to forgive student loans. They had no legal authority to do so. And they kept over and over again trying illegal means and got slotted down by a court. The difference is that ultimately the people in the Biden administration abided by what the court said, it's not clear that Trump will. And I think that if he doesn't, we are set up for a crisis of a magnitude that we have not seen perhaps since the civil war

in the United States. And I am worried. Yeah. So, Zach, to come to you on that, I mean, game out for us. Like, how would a crisis look? Because Megan makes a very good point. I mean, U.S. Marshals are the bodies that enforce federal court, you know, warrants and injunctions and summons. They are employees of the Department of Justice under Trump's Attorney General. So what could this look like? And then if you are going to kind of broach that type of crisis in the United States, who steps in to resolve it? Are we just basically relying on the moral authority ultimately of the Supreme Court? to express its opinion and for the administration then to honor the Supreme Court and what it says.

That's it, right? It's like the Supreme Court is supposed to be the ultimate authority on disputes over the legality of any individual order or law. And then if the president just says, no, make me, as you suggested, then it is, I mean, we're outside the territory of law. I mean, right? we're in the kind of constitutional crisis that you've experienced and you've seen in a lot of weak democracies where there's multiple different claims to democratic authority to being the true voice of the people. And no one respects the legal procedures and the laws enough to say, okay, well, I'm just going to defer to whatever they are at this point in time. And what that almost always ends with is one of two things.

Either one, you get military intervention and it is resolved by the force of arms, right, military or semi-military like the National Guard, some kind of armed force getting involved. Because ultimately, that's what these things come down to when people don't trust law, right? Is who has the guns and who are the people with the guns willing to listen to. And the second scenario is a kind of mass popular uprising, right? Is that large numbers of people get onto the streets, get involved in political protest movements, and create a form of pressure most likely against the Trump administration in a situation like this to try that would, then I guess the mechanism avenues of influence is still through the military most likely, but or other actors in the government to influence them to change their opinion. and their actions on this. And here I do, I think I disagree a little bit with Megan. I think there's a lot of evidence that people care about democracy at a bedrock level.

They don't care about every little nicety of democratic norms and discourse. But when they feel like democracy itself is on the line, that the fundamentals of the political system are at risk, there is a lot, a lot, a lot of evidence that people are willing to turn out and demonstrate on those fronts. You know, get protests just to take two recent examples. examples, the 23 protests in Israel against the judicial coup and the, which we talked about earlier, and the 24, South Korean protests against martial law, right? The movement that stopped, essentially an attempt to conduct a self-coup by the president of South Korea stopped it before it started, primarily because people turned out and wanted to do something about it.

So, yeah, people really do, I think, care about democracy. But they have to be convinced that there is a crisis that requires their intervention, that requires them to disrupt their daily life in order to get involved. And I think one thing that could do that very clearly is the president saying, I'm not going to listen to the Supreme Court. So let me put that a slightly different way,

which is that I think that people do care, obviously, about their own right to vote, to representation, and so forth. What I think they don't care about is legal norms. And to give an example, when a prosecutor in New York used a highly novel legal theory to inflate a bunch of misdemeanors

for Trump paying off a porn star that he had slept with, allegedly. These were misdemeanors at best. There was no clear theory of why they were illegal. In fact, it is legal to pay off porn stars you've slept with, whether or not it should be. But even if there was something wrong, these were misdemeanors that had,

where the statute of limitations had expired. So the New York District Attorney basically bundles them with a theory that this represented a violation of one or more different statutes, but you don't have to agree on which statute it violated. You don't even have to know what the statute is. We're not going to tell you. And basically brought them into a felony, like by bundling them and escalating them with this theory, brought them to felonies, which put them back in the statute of limitations, prosecuted. Trump and secured convictions. And I had any number of progressive people who had been really, really invested in the rule of law and not abusing your authority telling me that Trump is a convicted felon, 34 felonies, right? They didn't care about the rule of law. They cared about getting

Trump. They didn't care about prosecutorial abuse. They cared about getting Trump. Trump's a bad dude. Trump should be in jail. And that is a really common instinct. And so I think to the extent, that what Trump is doing is popular and he defies a Supreme Court order, yes, you will get progressives who hate Trump and want him in jail in the streets. But is the average person in America going to be like, well, the Supreme Court said so, he has to do it because rule of law, I don't think so. Because I think vanishingly few people actually care about the rule of law in a consistent way. They care about the rule of law when it benefits people like them and when they see it as operating to benefit people like them, and they don't care when it hurts something

that they want done. Yeah. Well, so, okay, Zach, Megan, we're going to have to leave it there, but thanks for coming on the program. Another great round the horn. We got in on all the big issues that I'd hope we'd debate and discuss. So I look forward to our next conversation in a couple weeks' time. Until then, be well, and we'll speak to you soon. Thanks. Take care. The Monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating.

Thank you again for listening.