The Opinions - The New Tactic Trump Thinks Will Rally Voters

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

The Iran war isn’t going well for President Trump. The midterms are approaching. What’s a desperate president to do? Turn to Communism. This week the Opinion national politics correspondent Michelle Cottle speaks to the columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French on how conservatives — especially Trump — are using Red Scare tactics to their advantage against the Democrats. Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Video editing by Kristen Williamson. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Annika Robbins and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All right, starting us off. I have a quick question. What were your first associations with communism growing up? Jamel, you're really too young to remember the Cold War, so how did it come up for you? Reading the Marx and Angles reader when I was in high school. That's going to the public library, picking up a copy of the Marx Angles reader, and reading the Communist Manifesto. That is my association from communism. Okay. David, my fellow Gen Xer. You know, Michelle, I bet we encountered communism in a very similar way that you heard about it so much you can't remember the first time you heard about it. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. This was the dominant confrontation of our childhoods, was the confrontation between American and Western democracy and Soviet communism. And so, you know, when I was thinking this through, I thought it's very similar in a reverse sort of way to someone asking me, when's the first time you heard about Jesus?

Well, I don't know. Exactly. I grew up in a Christian home. I don't remember not hearing about it. For me, I was the child of a Navy veteran. My dad was in the Navy during Vietnam. But it's just it was always out there. You know, I was Reagan era.

Mr. Gorbachev tear down that wall. The whole, you know, the Cold War ended when I was in college. So it was just always there until it wasn't. So I asked this because the communist threat is part of what we're going to talk about this week, but not looking back to the 80s or before. We're going to dig into a recent piece, Jamel, that you wrote, about how President Trump has resurrected the specter of communism as a scare tactic heading into the November midterms. But first, we're going to take a look at the on-again, off-again war in Iran and whether the U.S. is headed into a new phase of

escalation or even, dare I say it, a quagmire. So maybe the theme of the week is everything old is new again. I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times opinion. And this week, I'm back with my usual co-conspirators, columnist David French and Jamel Bowie. So David, back in June, you predicted that, quote, we might cycle through several more stages of almost war and almost peace. Oh, my God, it's like you're psychic.

So where are we now in that cycle and how close do you think we are at a full-scale war? With the usual caveat that we are taping on Thursday morning and it can go anywhere. You know, I want to begin by paraphrasing Darth Sidious from Star Wars, all is unfolding as we have foreseen that this is a very predictable outcome. And it's been very predictable ever since. And I really want to commend our colleagues on the news side. did this really, I thought, insightful analysis in the middle of one of the rounds of negotiations, because we've been through a few rounds of negotiations. And essentially what they were saying

was how do you negotiate a resolution to a war when both sides are zealously committed to declaring victory? And one of the things that you have seen here is one of the reasons why we keep cycling into not fully war, not fully peace, not fully war, not fully peace, is that both sides have this, well, Trump in particular, has an aversion to a longer war, and he also has an aversion to having been seen as losing a war. So he's got both of these things going on at once. The one thing he does not want by any stretch of the imagination is for somebody to be able to credibly say, you cut a worse deal than Obama.

You were taken for a ride by the nation of Iran. that that is the absolute last thing that he wants. At the same time, the Iranian regime also has a desire to be seen as having triumphed over the United States. That's a very important thing, both domestically and internationally, for Iran to be seen as having triumphed over the United States. So you don't just have strategic, long-term strategic thinking going on here. And in fact, on the U.S. side, I would say that an awful lot of people on the U.S. side are not

engaging in long-term strategic thinking at all. But some are, but many are not. But don't look at this conflict as sort of two coldly rational parties engaging in negotiation, escalation, et cetera, according to deliberately thought out strategically valid strategies. Think of it instead is there are elements of strategy here. They're elements of essentially posturing here. And they're adding together into a situation where both sides tend to have their foot on the gas, as I've used this analogy before, much more than their foot on the brake when it comes to escalation. So now we're beyond just the Persian Gulf. We've escalated into the Red Sea. You are seeing very precise and devastating strikes on American facilities that have killed

American service members. There is widening amount of damage in the Persian Gulf region, Iran is obviously suffering as well. But the one thing that I will say is I do think, even as Iran is posturing obviously, it does have a strategy. And I'm not sure that we do. And its strategy is it wants to emerge from this thing, made whole financially and in control the straight of Hormuz. And when you see that, and when you see that strategy, at least some of what they're doing makes sense. At the same time, they continue to provoke and to stretch and to extend beyond, really, I think, their military reach and military capacity. So I don't know that there, I think we have two sides that are miscalculating here is a shorter way of saying it.

Jamal. I am reminded not of, excuse me very pretentious. I reminded not of Star Wars, but of Clausewitz, who states, frequently come up together. Yeah. Well, this is so on brand here. I know. It's really, I mean, that's why it's pretentious.

It's like, I can't help myself. Who states, the first, the Supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesmen and commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking, either mistaking it forward or turning it into something that is alien to its nature. First thing they must do when embarking upon an armed conflict because in Klausud's famous dictum, war is politics by other means. It is done to achieve a specific political objective. And I think the distinguishing fact about this war in Iran is that that's not the case. What is the specific political objective this war has begun to achieve?

They could not articulate it at the beginning of the war. They had to search for answers. We know, right from observation, from the great reporting of our colleagues in the newsroom, that this war was embarked upon kind of because Donald Trump wanted something to do. He had gotten, he felt confident after the incursion into Venezuela believed that he could solve the Iranian problem with a few airstrikes. And then there'd be regime changed and they'd greet us as liberators and et cetera, et cetera. And when that didn't happen, they were lost. And they've been lost ever since. When essentially the fantasy that they had did not come to pass, they found themselves in a conflict that first they began in ways, basically guaranteed that Iran was not going to back down, right?

When you, you know, launch decapitation strikes. We do all this stuff. your opponent is, they're not going to want to back down. That's losing too much face. And as you said, David Trump is incapable of losing face. And neither he nor Pete Hankseth, there really seems to anyone in the administration, is even grappling with the larger strategic picture whatsoever. And they are also consumed of a fantasy that, you know, help contribute to America's defeat in Vietnam, which is that you can do everything. thing you want with air power. You just drop some bombs. Drop some bombs and you'll fix the problem.

And that's just not the case. And so they're stuck in a situation where they don't have a clear political objective anymore, or at least now that they have one, it's sort of like the results of the war, right? It's like maintain freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hermuz, which was the case in the status quo antebellum, right? Like before the war, we already had that. And now you're trying to restore that. So, you know. Well played. That's their objective such that they have one.

But they don't know how, they don't, they, they fundamentally don't understand the nature of the war that they're fighting. And as such, their tactics such that they are are inadequate to the task. And doing anything more that might be adequate to the task, not only is a heavy domestic political lift, but also cuts against Donald Trump's own fears and instincts. And so here we are. We're just like dropping bombs, targeting civilian infrastructure as if, as if, you know, war is a game of how many war crimes you can commit. Maybe you don't want to use them more crime, but I do think that attacking civilian

infrastructure is bad. Doing it essentially to punish someone into submission is bad. It's as if you got into a schoolyard fight and then grab the person's younger sister and, like, beat them up instead, right? like, you know, and they're wasting American munitions. I mean, this is one of the things that's happening if the U.S. is like literally running out of missiles and leaving the U.S. unable to deal with its other strategic goals and other theaters of global conflict of the world. I want to pause and walk through a few more of the data points that we've got on the war so far.

So 18 U.S. service members have died so far, and many more have been injured, I think, just since July 6th. A hundred troops have been injured. Gas prices are back up to around $4 a gallon. Straight of Hormuz's reigns a flashpoint. Now the Houthis have started blockading and firing on ships traveling to and from Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea. That threatens to drive oil prices even higher. So, David, how. how nervous are you about this escalating into a wider regional conflict with all of this going on?

Like, how nervous should we be? I think we should be, is this a technical term, pretty darn nervous? That is the technical term, yes. Pretty darn nervous, but not panicked is the way that I would put it. And I think there's also this other element that is overlaying all of this. And that is, if until you encounter, or MAGA up close, it's hard to describe how arrogant it is, and that there is an enormous amount of hubris. If you go back, J.D. Vance, remember, was being asked about this because, you know,

the administration had said that Kamala Harris would drive us into war with Iran, and if you don't want to go to war with Iran, then vote for Donald Trump. Well, and here we are at war with Iran. And J.D. Vance is confronted with this, and one of the things he says is, well, prior presidents were dumb. They were dumb and we're not. And there just seems to be when you are around MAGA, this view that we know obviously true and correct things. And the reason why these obviously true and correct things have not been done before is because of cowardice or stupidity or you name it. And it's that level of arrogance that they've brought into this almost impossibly complex situation that is contributing immensely to our problem and to our challenge. You know, it's,

it's very interesting whenever you see something unfold where you can say it wasn't just predictable how this would unfold, it was predicted. It had been predicted that this is how this would unfold. And so I think that is hovering in the background, Michelle here, that make this arrogance, this hubris, that we cannot be possibly be wrong. that other political politicians and political movements were all idiots before us. They just needed more testosterone, right? Just needed more high tea, man. Yeah.

And how deeply embedded that level of arrogance is within that MAGA world. And that makes me more nervous. Now, tempering that is also the fact that I think Trump very much does not want a ground war. He very much does not want that. And I think that that is one of the few things preventing escalation and out of control escalation right now. All right. So domestically speaking, it feels like the trickiest position is the one that congressional Republicans are in who they have to own a war. They didn't really want. They never voted to approve. And yet are now having to publicly defend as they're going into high stakes, midterm elections, which are generally a referendum on the president. Is this going to bite them, do we think?

Just on gas prizes alone? I think it will bite them. I think that that is a pretty safe prediction. What is the perilous prediction is how deep of a bite will it be? That is the question. I do think that you're looking at some form of rebuke. We just don't know to what extent we're going to see the rebuke. in the right-wing world that is sort of right-wing infotainment,

remember there's generally two kinds of stories. Trump is triumphant, and Trump is being unfairly attacked. And you're still seeing an enormous amount of Republican loyalty. I was looking at some polling data from this last week, and it was saying that Trump, amongst Republicans, is more popular right now at this point in his second term than George W. Bush was with Republicans, and then Barack Obama was with Democrats.

In other words, that with the partisan Republicans, Trump still has an enormous amount of support. And we're still sort of Lucy with the football with the thing that says, this is the thing that will break that. This is finally the thing. So a question, just a question. So that's happening at the same time

that his approval with the independence has dropped precipitously, right? Right. To what extent are we looking at a function of people disidentifying as Republicans, right? So they're saying, I don't think I'm a Republican anymore, or I'm an independent, right? And so they leave the pool of people, and as an independent, they disagree, they disapprove with the president. But by leaving the pool, it creates the appearance that his approval hasn't actually declined much from Republicans, and all you're seeing is a shrinking number of Republicans. Those are still

on board. I think that's a super fair observation. In fact, is buttressed by some data from Gallup that shows that the identifiers of independence is at, you know, a generational or more high. So I do think that that is happening. There's a shrinking, but the shrinking is also occurring with Democrats as well. They're shrinking as well. So I do think there is a intense loyalty. remains within a shrinking pool. But there is definitely still that intense loyalty. But as you note, Jamel, I do think that overall pool is shrinking. Yeah, I think you're seeing that with both sides. And it feeds into the overall distrust of institutions. And if you talk to younger folks, younger voters in particular, are just suspicious of the parties. But this brings us back to our

red scare that we mentioned earlier. Jamel, you just wrote a piece about. how Trump is bringing back the classical American political tactic of red baiting. So much fun. And so rather than focusing on his own record, he's going to spend the midterm run-up accusing Democrats of being communists and of aiming to turn America into a communist country. So like, now this, like so much of what he does, this really feels stuck in the past. But kind of how does what's happening now compare with, say, the 1950s and McCarthyism? I mean, the big difference. And let me say real quick, you know, other Republicans are getting in on this as well.

And like Steve Scalese referred to, you know, stopping Bolsheviks. Just that was very funny, you know, sort of calling Democrats, talking Bolsheviks. It's like, we're, you know. It's 1917. Yeah. Wow. Doesn't he seem hip and modern?

But, you know, in the 1950s, the sort of, Soviet Union existed. It didn't just exist. It was a rival superpower. It wasn't just a rival superpower. It was, in the moment, a viable alternative to American-style capitalism and liberal democracy. In the United States at the time, there was a not huge, but like significant actual communist party that was active in American politics. There is still a socialist party in the American in American politics, not as active, but still there. In the American, in the American left was not quite at the high watermark of its power, but like still quite influential. And so in the 1950s, when Soviet Union has detonated a hydrogen bomb, when the nuclear arms race

is taking off, when again, Soviet communism is spreading as a geopolitical force and is a viable alternative, then warning about the red menace makes a bunch of sense, right? Like, it actually there are plenty of Americans who will hear about the red menace, but yeah, I'm worried about that. That's scary to me. Hollywood is always a great barometer of these sorts of things. And there are plenty of movies in the 40s and 50s about communist infiltrators. I mean, quite famous ones, like invasion of the body snatchers. So that's very much a part of the pop culture and a very kind of salient fear.

In 26, there's no Soviet Union. China is nominally communist. I mean, the CCP obviously is an authoritarian formation, but like in terms of its economy, that's capitalism, baby. And or at least state capitalism, right? So it's like, what are we warning about? It's not really a threat. What I think it's supposed to do is take the success of candidates

associated with the Democratic Socialists of America and say, look, socialist, communist, this is the same thing, really. But I think this misses two things. The first, I mean, the first public opinion one is that the American public, which has not become pro-socialism, but like, I think like 39% of Americans have a favorable view, right? The second thing is that in an interesting way, DSA seems to connote anti-establishment, not socialism, right?

Like, for the public, for voters, it seems to say, oh, this is a person who isn't an ordinary Democrat and doesn't seem to have the same kind of, like, ideological avail. It's interesting. It's interesting the way DSA functions for voters. And then this is just an aside from my part, it's like funny to accuse DSA candidates of being communist because DSA, once they famously for nerds know this, DSA is formed from at least one organization led by Michael Herring in 1970s that was explicitly left anti-communism.

These were American leftists who were anti-Stalinists back in the 40s and 50s. and were hostile to communism. That's where the democratic part of that is supposed to connote we're not authoritarian. So I think that's the strategy. You know, look at Zoran, look at the other merit candidates, look at a handful of people. They're DSA members.

They're socialists. They're communist. They're scary. But I just don't think it doesn't land with anyone, especially not when, you know, you came to office promising to love. lower gas and food prices and housing prices, and you haven't done it. And not only that, you've made them worse. Okay, so I take the differences in the reality that you're talking about.

I get all those. Trump's great gift politically has always been, however, to take this germ of a fact or a reality or something and just spin it into some kind of insane, brooky. dark fantasy, whether you're talking about government corruption or immigration or crime or whatever, he has the ability to take something and turn it into something entirely fantastical almost. But in this case, for people who don't pay that much attention to what exactly the DSA stands for or how it differs from, you know, regular socialism, even, you know, much less communism. David, do you think that he will have much success making this link in people's minds and turning this into, you know, not a referendum on him so much as a referendum on democratic extremism?

Yeah. So, you know, look, I take fully Jamel's points that he just raised, as you, as you just said, I mean, like, one of the differences between the McCarthy era and now is in the McCarthy era, there was a red menace. Like, the Soviet Union was an expansionist genocidal power that, you know, by the 1980s, you had millions of troops poised in Eastern Europe, poised for an invasion of NATO, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on both sides pointed at each other. Like, the order, the differences here are such an order of magnitude between that. And the, the, the differences here, and a few DSA politicians hyper-concentrated in New York City, that it is, it's, there's just no comparison. But anyone who underestimates the ability of Donald Trump and the entire sort of right-wing infotainment

universe to turn, at least in the minds of millions and millions and millions of Americans, this contest as to one between whatever you want to say, about the MAGA people, they, whatever flaws you want to say, they're American patriots who like capitalism and they like the American system. And then you've got these Marxists over there. I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but AOC is sort of the focus of evil in the democratic world, has moved over more to like a Rashida Tlaib or Ilyan Omar. The right-wing infotainment world absolutely has the ability to take individual, fringe individuals, and elevate them and say, this is who the Democrats are. And the interesting thing about that conundrum is if I'm a Democrat,

I'm not necessarily loving the DSA that much, because it will often feel as if the DSA is not so much focused on defeating Republicans as it is focused on defeating establishment Democrats, which is a very similar dynamic that you saw unfold in the Tea Party side of the Republican Party, where really, you know, if you wanted to get a hardcore Tea Party person, like, agitated, absolutely you say the name Barack Obama. They did not like Barack Obama. But I tell you, you would see almost equal anger when you'd use the name Mitch McConnell. And so when you have these factional fights in a larger, bigger movement,

and one faction seems to be concerned primarily with taking control of the movement, more so than essentially defeating the actual political opposition, I think that's a real issue for Democrats right now. There is some real extremism within the DSA, like some real extremism that is, in some cases, very ugly extremism. And so I think I take completely the point, completely the point,

that a actual red scare is ludicrous, ludicrous. It is also true that there are actual real extremists who actually are not all that excited about defeating Republicans compared to destroying the Democratic establishment. And I think that's a problem. So I think I have two thoughts. The first is just on the ability of the conservative media, conservative media apparatus to sort of like create a message. That's the case, right? I think my view is that discourse actually doesn't move everything, right? Discourse is most effective when it dovetails with things people are actually experiencing, right?

And so the president's immigration fear-mongering dovetails with the sense from at least a lot of Americans, right, that the border is at a control, that kind of thing. First of all, there's no sense in which Americans are threatened by communism. It's just like it's not a thing. And second, this would be different if the president and the Republican Congress has fulfilled the promises on which they used to get elected. But they haven't. The conditions that got them elected don't just remain, but their policies have worsened them.

And so the reason I'm very skeptical of this is that you can scream about communism. you can show, you know, darkened pictures of Talib and Omar as much as you want. And it doesn't change the fact that when someone goes to fill up their car, they're spending $60, right? And so, again, you can scream all you want about, about, assort of threats, about the Red Menace. But I do think that there is a hard limit to what that can do to persuade voters when you haven't done anything to alleviate their concerns. And critically, the one piece of legislation you pass, the big beautiful bill, is resulting in massive cuts to food assistance. Massive cuts to health care, right? And I'm just, I myself am exceedingly skeptical of the ability of messaging to overcome actual material conditions, especially for those voters who aren't plugged in to conservative media.

Those voters who are not in the middle ideologically, but like are loosely attached to the electorate. and who are going to be voting if they vote on the basis of their vibe about the world, about their pocketbook and their sense of where they are in terms of their pocketbook. The other really quick point is just that I think it's important to see that a lot of the success of DSA candidates, there aren't enough self-identified socialist or progressives to help a DSA candidate win in the typical Democratic primary. They just aren't, even in New York, right? the success of these candidates has, I think, been about the fact that DSA candidates seem to want to fight Republicans in a way that establishment Democrats do not.

Like, the complaint with establishment Democrats isn't ideological. It isn't that they aren't going far enough on a set of policies. The complaint is that, while Donald Trump is running roughshed over American democracy, a Chuck Schumer or a Hakeemem Jeffrey is talking about their friends on the Republican side. And DSA candidates are presenting themselves as candidates who will actually show the level of aggression that Democratic voters want to see against Republicans. I mean, that defeating the establishment Democrats then becomes a means to an end and not an end in and of itself. So speaking to your point, Jamel, can the DSA mobilize people with their kind of fighting spirit with Trump? at the same time, as my inbox will attest, the Republicans are going all in on turning this into what has become known as the hate election, which is how much can you get, not just your

voters, but, you know, people who might be anxious about the idea of more extremist democratic candidates turning the country into something they don't recognize. How much can you mobilize them? Certainly, they are working. work in this with on the fundraising side just incessantly. And I always, there's the issue of, you know, the balance between a candidate that excites their own voters versus the candidate who also is exciting the other side's voters. And I think that's what's making a lot of Democrats nervous in places outside of New York. Like, obviously, if you're a safe blue district in New York, whoever you nominates going to get it, that just like, as the Democrat,

nominee. This is not the same for, say, you know, like Colorado 8, big swing district, Republican incumbent, very vulnerable, the more liberal, progressive candidate won. And that makes a lot of people nervous about whether or not they can pull it off. Same thing with, same thing with a lot of what we're seeing in Michigan. So that's my question. I mean, I don't know the answer. I don't know. There's, there's been a bunch of generic ballot polls the past couple days. Fox News has the generic ballot D plus seven. Emerson has a D plus 11, which is wild. But like there's the spread is like D plus four to D plus 11. And you look at individual Senate races, you know, the candidate, the Democratic candidate in Iowa, whose name I cannot recall at the moment is like even in that race. Are you talking about the Senate

candidate? Yeah. The Senate candidate. John Ossoff is likely going to win his Senate election, his reelection by like close to double digits it's looking like if current trends continue. Georgia has been freak show on the Republican side from the beginning. Yeah, but I mean, this is my point, right? Like, when you're looking at individual races, the picture, it doesn't look like a picture where Republicans are on the offensive. It looks like a picture when they're very much on the defensive, where they're having to focus much more on races that in an environment where things were much more in their favor,

they wouldn't have to, right? The Senate, the Senate is in play in a way that it simply wasn't a year ago. go. And I just don't think that screaming about communism is going to change that. Because the sentence in play, because people are responding to conditions. This is where I'm really going to double down on this. Like actual material conditions really matter. I respect that. I respect that. It's not all discourse. We are a lot, our jobs are discourse. I think it's very tempting to sort of imagine that everything is shaped by discourse, but like it is not. Nothing. The fundamentals are against the Republicans in every way this time. So it's, it will be interesting to see how much

the discourse matters. Let me use an analogy that my friend Sarah Isker came up with, which I think is just brilliant when it comes to politics and the discourse or politics and even campaign consultants and campaign strategists. She used the analogy of curling. In curling, what do you do? You throw a big rock. Well, you don't throw it. You slide it. I think that maybe they actually call it. That's not how I I don't, I think throwing would get just qualified. Yeah, yeah. No, they slide it. Okay, so I'm obviously not a curling aficionado here. I got it. And then you have the sweepers, right? And the sweepers, they vigorously work. And if they do their job perfectly, they can slightly adjust the trajectory of the rock. Yeah. Slightly, right? And that can slight, can make all the difference, you know,

in a very close Olympic match. But the bottom line is, if you have a, bad, you know, if that initial slide, throw, whatever you want to call it, is bad, and it goes off in a wrong direction or a bad direction, you can have the world's best sweepers, and they're not going to move, they're not going to move the needle in any meaningful way. And I think what Chamele is talking about is the underlying conditions of the country are the rock here. That is the thing that is the fundamental unyielding reality of this election is that Donald Trump walked into office with a mandate to do, mainly to repair the economy and fix inflation and provide sort of a degree of normalcy, like, et cetera, at the border.

And he created an enormous amount of chaos. He flipped inflation back in the wrong way. And that's all the rock. And all of these fundraising emails that, you know, in text, a friend of mine sent me one, and I will read it to you. very, very measured. A communist plot unearthed four miles from your home, Trump begged the Pentagon for $350 billion to respond. And I don't think it's going to really work. So yeah, I totally agree with Jamel. The core of this election, the core of it is going to be rejection of Donald

Trump and the economy in the world that he's created. And I think it will be so comprehensive that multiple factions within the Democratic Party will be able to say, see, it worked, that you'll have some DSA candidates win, everybody will have mainstream candidates win, and so they're all going to have a case for how, you know, that they can be the standard bear going forward. Okay, that's going to make 2028 fun. Oh, yeah. But at the margins, this stuff still does matter. Okay, well, I can't resist drawing this to a close on a curling analogy. How often do we get to do that? So let's, Let's just take that and move right on into recommendations. Who wants to go first?

Tell me what you got. Jamel, you go. Sure. My favorite director is Sydney Lumet. Not an entour, so it doesn't necessarily have a big reputation outside of nerds. But if you watch a lot of movies, you've seen a Sidney Lumet film, 12 Angry Men is a famous one. Serpico, network. I mean, the guy did a lot, worked a lot, made a lot of great movies.

I've seen most Lumet movies. So I recently watched the pawnbroker, which is about a Holocaust survivor who works as a pawnbroker. He's the titular pawnbroker and an East Harlem pawn shop. And it is marvelous. A marvelous film, Steiger's performance is incredible. And it is this look at how trauma is something that may be impossible to get by. I'll say, this is not a happy movie. This is a happy picture.

It's actually quite bleak. And it's a character study, first and foremost, there's not much of a plot to it. And it's simply examining this person who is so deeply affected by their trauma that they really, they really cannot get past it. And all the ways that kind of renders them lonely in their life. And it's very reminiscent of the work of the Safty Brothers. Uncut Gems is like a very different movie. But there's like some DNA. Lumet, who is a great New York director,

there's like some clear Lumet DNA in the Safty Brothers work. And you can kind of see that if you watch these two back to back. And now Jamel, the film critic, turns off. Watch the Palm Broker. It's great. And moving on to David, the film critic. Okay. So the easy thing to say is go see The Odyssey.

but it just requires more conversation than this. I saw it over the weekend. I'm going to see it again this weekend. But here is my actual recommendation. Okay, Apple TV's Cape Fear. Now, this is a, it's based on a book called The Executioners. I think there's a 1962 movie that I have not seen. It's amazing.

Yeah, I've heard this. There's a 1991 movie with Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte that I have seen. That was really good. also great. But imagine this, y'all. Imagine you have the writer's room and in walks the showrunner or the director or whatever. And he distributes scripts to the 1991 Cape Fear. And he says, okay, I want you to use this as a basis. But before you start writing, I'm going to distribute you crack pipes laced with LSD. And I'm going to ask you to just go ahead and puff up and then start writing. Because, This story takes an already wild story and turns it into something that is just a carnival funhouse of horrors. And it's a spectacular ride. Okay. Well, there we go.

I wanted to be on theme. I just felt the need. So I went back and rewatched the death of Stalin. The 2018 Armando Ianducci kind of dark comments. political satire. And it's all about what happens after Stalin Drops dead in 1953 and the ensuing power struggle between, you know, you've got Khrushchev and Zukov and Malenkov and Molotov. And the sniveling secrecy combined with the cutthroat ambition and just, like, it's brilliant. I'm an Ionucci fan, although I tend to like the stuff he did.

you know, back in the UK with like the thick of it even better than VEP. So I was primed to like this. But that said, it feels a little too on point at certain moments in our current political situation. So just just go in with that warning. It's very funny, but at some point you're you're likely to go, oh, okay, okay. That feels a little too real. Can I say, too, that I love in that movie that they, you know, they don't, No one attempts a Russian accent.

They all have their particular U.K. accents. And I think that actually really works because it gives you a sense of how the actual guys were from different parts of the Soviet Union. They would have had different accents, spoke Russian in different ways. And so you kind of get this sense of like, yeah, this is roughly, you know. Well, there we go. Jamel has elevated this. I hadn't even thought of that. So there you go.

I'm a big movie nerd, folks. There you go. What? Really? And with that, we're going to land this plane. guys, as always, thank you. I feel we've solved the world's problems this week. Let's do it again soon.

Looking forward to it. Thank you, Michelle.