The Ricochet Podcast - That Book

Episode Date: January 5, 2018

First podcast of 2018 so we wanted to out our best foot forward. We’ve got Commentary’s Sohrab Ahmari on Iran and The Washington Examiner’s Byron York on The Book, collusion, and Congress. Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy year. Music from this week’s show: Everyday I Write The Book by Elvis Costello... Source

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disgraceful and laughable. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. I'm James Lalix. Our guests today are Saurabh Amari about Iran and Byron York on Washington. Let's have ourselves a podcast. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 384. We're brought to you by fine people at Tracker. Your phone, your wallet, your keys, you know they're plotting against you. They're hiding somewhere trying to make you late. Well, their sick game is finally over thanks to Tracker, your phone, your wallet, your keys, you know they're plotting against you. They're hiding somewhere trying to make you late.

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Just pay for shipping. And we're brought to you also by Ricochet itself. Listen, in these uncivil times, it's possible to have civil conversations. Really, it is. Even with people you like but disagree or people you may not kind of sort of like all that much, but you have something in common. Ricochet is the place where people come together and have these conversations because there's a code of conduct. You can't say some things not because we're being censorious prudes, but because you know what YouTube descends into, profanity and

madness, right? So the code of conduct is simply about how people treat each other in the comments, and it makes for a much better reading internet experience. Hey, give Ricochet a try and get your first month free. That's ricochet.com slash join, ricochet.com slash join, and you'll make Rob Long, wherever he is, very happy if you do so. And you'll make Peter happy too peter hey how you doing california it's four below here in minnesota what are your temps like there oh thank you i was about to say it's a kind of grim rainy day here but when you tell me that it's four below where you are i can rejoice in my way i don't know it's 60 degrees 62 something like that you know i think when i think dim and rainy and gray and damp, Steve Bannon comes to mind presently.

And of course, he's been the story, part of the story this week, thanks to his effusive comments that Michael Wolff has translated into a book. What do you think is going to become of Bannonism? Is it a spent force? Is he gone? Will the mantle be picked up by somebody else? What do you think? Hard to – he is a spent force in any substantive sense. He has no – I believe – it's still unclear at least according to what I've read whether he's going to stay with Breitbart or the people who back Breitbart are going to toss him out altogether.

But as best I can tell, he lacks any institutional presence in politics absent Breitbart. On the other hand, the press loves him. He's so outrageous. You can't change channels and see Bannon, this disheveled look, hasn't shaved in three days, bloodshot eyes, and yet there he is on your television saying arresting outrageous things. the press just loves him because he's a good copy in himself and because they can use him against Trump. So my guess is that Steve Bannon is going to be around for a long, long time but have declining political influence. That's my guess. In fact, his political influence may essentially be over already.

Yeah, I don't think anybody's looking for that 2020 bid. I mean, it's interesting when you say the media loves him because when you see this shambling hobo figure saying these things, you can't not turn away, you can't not be riveted. I'm not riveted. Oh, you're not? No, I'm not. I find the man repellent,

and I have no interest in what he has to say. I just don't, and I never have. I find him to be like, no. So I don't pay attention to him. And, I mean, I get secondhand sometimes when he says something or filters through or pops up on Twitter. But the whole Breitbart – I mean, I left Breitbart years ago. I'm not interested when he speaks because why would I care now what a post-White House Steve Bannon says? When he's in there, when he was in there and you would hear these things coming out about some of his – yeah, then they're pertinent.

But now, why would anybody care? Why, to the moment that he left, would anybody care? And aren't we sort of – isn't it sort of – aren't we obliged maybe to turn away from times, from these things so that we don't get the next iteration of Bannon, which is worse? Oh, well. You know? No, no. Let's find another one. If you were to say – I mean the general tenor of your remarks is he has no political power.

He's saying repellent things. Wouldn't it be better for all of us if we just turned away? Answers to all three of those yes, yes, and yes. I'm just saying I don't, I think he'll be around. He'll be on cable news for a long time to come because people find him arresting. And you're right there. When you say cable news, you know, the shows, I, I see them only when I walk past our, our vast sci-fi technologically advanced hub at the newspaper.

And there's all of these screens going up and I read the chyrons and I see what they're talking about. And that's, that's pretty much it because i don't pay it the whole cable news world with its constant bonging and swooping and breaking and the rest of it i find i find annoying as hell and so we just spend so if you don't spend any time in the cable news world you have a different view of the imminence and the importance and the momentum of these things the president according to the book and what we hear elsewhere, spends a lot of time in this world, doesn't he? Yes, he does.

Yes, he does. You're right about all of this. On his best night, Bill O'Reilly, no longer with Fox, Bill O'Reilly drew not quite four million viewers. Sean Hannity, who's now the big star at Fox, draws three, three and a half, two and a half in that range. CNBC, MSNBC, I beg your pardon, CNN, MSNBC, add them all together and you're still talking on their Washington. That's where the buzz lies. I'm with you. We'd all be a lot better off if we spent much less time. Well, you don't spend much time there. My own health would be better off, mental health, if I spent less time in the buzz. But as best I can tell from this book and from every other account, Donald Trump just loves cable television. What do you think about the book? From what you've read, the excerpts that you've read, everything we know now about the Gorilla Channel, what do you think? I've read the excerpt that appeared in New York Magazine, and then I've read a few excerpts as the book was quoted in other places.

In other words, I'm a long, long way from having read the book itself. Here's what I think. It is, it's irresistibly written in the manner of, it's a kind of cross between People Magazine and Woodward and Bernstein. So it's gossipy and a kind of, um, gives you the same sense that you, that you have, not that I'm, i'm sounding as though i do nothing but watch cable news and read people magazine but when you're when you're reading at the checkout line of the grocery store you see headlines about the stars and oh what the real life of those people so this you have that feeling that it's taking you to the real life i will say that the few people i

know who are quoted in the book sound like themselves. I don't know whether they said what they are quoted as saying, but Wolfe knows them well enough to make them sound like themselves. It has that ring of authenticity. He clearly did spend a lot of time with the people he's portraying. On the other hand, Michael Wolfe's previous books, this is a point that John Podhoretz made in his New York Post column yesterday, Wolff has all kinds of errors in his previous books, and people are already picking up the errors that he's made in the excerpts that have appeared. Notably, he portrays a scene in which somebody mentions to President,

someone recommends to President-elect Donald Trump that he named John Boehner, former Speaker of the House, as his chief of staff. And according to Wolf, Donald Trump replied, who's that? Who's John Boehner? And of course, Donald Trump has played golf with John Boehner, tweeted about John Boehner. The idea that he didn't know who John Boehner was is ridiculous. So Wolf has at least a handful of howlers in there in what we've already seen. Yes, I agree. Wolf has a record, and anybody who has been following him for years knows that you are going to be entertained, and also you should have an eyebrow cocked up skeptically for some of these things. Let's take a look at that Boehner anecdote.

There are three possibilities. One, Wolf made it up and that he doesn't have a tape to back it up. He's quoting somebody who was in error, but it didn't happen. Two, it was a sarcastic remark by the president saying, you know, who is it to cut him down to size? Three, he didn't remember. He may have tweeted him. He may have played golf with him, but he didn't remember because there's something about the guy that is short-sighted, that doesn't remember, that isn't all completely there, which is one of the points the book makes. He's not all there. And this is the interesting thing. It seems to me that we can go along and be happy with everything that's happening. Dow over 25,000. Ice ramping up.

We're getting fewer regulations. It's all good. It's all good. It's all good. But we're turning away from the possibility that all of these things are saying about this guy that he's not all there. And this would not be unusual. This would this would be odd, except that it comports with a lot of stuff that we've heard that anybody who's been following Donald Trump for 25, 30 years knows his character, knows who he is and knows that the idea of a guy who is who falls asleep with boredom when you try to inform him of his constitutional duties and doesn't really read and you know it lives in the sort of television script mentality it's it's not that much of a surprise but but the gop just shrugs and says what are you gonna do that's my that's a pretty good answer actually what are you going to do right uh yeah so he's forgetful

he's 70 years old he forgets names maybe maybe he. We don't even know that. He watches a lot of TV. The other thing about the Wolf book is that it doesn't – when it comes right down to it's it's it's sort of fun in the gossipy sense it's sort of outrageous it enables us to get worked up about things all over again but really does it tell us anything we don't know well it's about the first year and we all got the first year under our belt and the first year was hell i know we've forgotten about the first year because the second year seems to be going a little better but it's still the same guy at the top of the organization and the these elements are going to play out again and again and again. But we'll see.

And there are more issues in the world to talk about beyond how many hamburgers and cheeseburgers Donald Trump eats. I found the interesting thing to be that he goes to McDonald's because the food is prepared in advance, and if someone wants to poison you, they can't do it because you're pointing at that burger there off the rack. It makes sense. The unfortunate part, however, is when you go to McDonald's and you lose your keys. Huh?

How's that, Rob? Rob Long would be around right now to say that was the worst transition he ever heard, and he'd be right. I did that just for him if he's listening. Hey, listen. When you do lose your keys, however, you know that it's impossible to do anything. You can't drive a car. You can't get into your house. What do you do? Well, that's why you should have put a tracker on the thing before. See, eight years ago, Tracker, that's T-R-A-C-K capital R, they changed everything. They released the first tracking device and now they've done it

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ridiculous. Bluetooth doesn't go that far. Listen, tracker user, that's you, is part of a large crowd-locating network in the world, the largest in the world. It's like Waze, except for finding your things, not your way. And Tracker's 30-day money-back guarantee means you have absolutely nothing, literally, to lose. Here's a special offer for listeners of you, the Ricochet podcast, thetracker.com slash ricochet, tracker.com slash ricochet to get 20 off any order that's spelled the tracker t-h-e-t-r-a-c-k-r.com forward slash ricochet for 20 off the tracker.com slash ricochet and our thanks to tracker for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast and now we have the pleasure of talking to so rob amamari he's a senior writer at commentary and previously he spent five years as editor and

columnist with the wall street journal opinion pages in London and New York. You can follow him on Twitter, at Sohrab al-Amari. Welcome, and we're all eyes on Iran right now. Can you tell us what's happening? Because oddly enough, the story doesn't seem to be reported in the American press as much as you think it might be. Yeah, the coverage has been a little bit spotty, to say the least. But for about a week now, there's been a popular uprising across the country, although it began in the city of Mashhad in the northeast of the country, a pious and conservative city where it seemed like people were angered by primarily economic issues,

joblessness, inflation that's running 20% to 40% reportedly, and public graft, the financial dealings of these regime-connected foundations for the poor and dispossessed, supposedly, but which are actually slush funds where who knows where the money comes from and where it goes. It seems to serve regime elites. So that anger sparked a protest in Mashhad and very quickly they went nationwide. And the slogans began to shift from merely economic issues to outright opposition to

the regime and interestingly to its policies in the Middle East. So one of the slogans that's been heard very commonly is, which means, not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life only for Iran. Another one is, let Syria be, do something for me, or think of me. So the people have connected, it seems, their lack of material prosperity with the regime's

Shiite revolutionary mission, its efforts to destabilize its own neighborhood, and in fact, the nature of the regime. So that's what's been happening. The protest, in my sense, is, although again, it's very hard to know on a day-to-day basis exactly what's happening where, but the numbers have dwindled somewhat. The arrests have gone up. I've heard as many as 1,000 people detained. This is a regime that was founded by revolutionaries. Therefore, they're very good at dealing with potential revolutions. That's the general outline of the scenario. So, Rob, Peter Robinson here. By the way, I've read and admire your work for years now, and this is the first time we're speaking. It's just a pleasure to have you with us. Well, I'm a big fan of your show at Hoover as well.

Thank you. Thomas Erdbrink is the New York Times Tehran Bureau Chief. By the way, hold on. Let's stop. So Rob Amari is your name. You just, as far as I know, you're Persian. Your Farsi accent was flawless. What's your personal background here? What grew up there until I was 13, about to turn 14 when my mother and I left. We were not political cases as such. I mean, I grew up in a typical urban secular milieu where the regime was not popular, but we weren't running away or we weren't political refugees or dissidents of any sort and uh so i moved to the u.s and and uh have not been back but that's my connection i still obviously care about it very much as my homeland um but now more in a professional sense and from a right sure but do you still have any family connections in Iran? You know, some, but my father died. He never left Iran and he died in early 2017. So now it's and a lot of my family is like many Iranian families is spread across this Persian diaspora from from Canada to Europe to and certainly many in the U.S. Right. Okay. So Thomas Erdbrink, bureau chief, Tehran bureau chief of the New York Times,

wrote, let's see, he wrote on December 29th that the protests were scattered, his word, and that they were dealing mainly with the government's handling of the economy, close quote,

and you just let him have it in a piece that you wrote on commentary on January 3rd. By the way, you were at the Wall Street Journal in London and New York, and as of – it seems to me it's still less than a year now you've been at Commentary magazine. So why did you let the New York Times and Thomas Erdbrink have it? Well, I mean I've been reading Mr. Erdbrink's work, like many others who are Iran watchers. To some extent, you have to pay attention to what he reports. And I've always been irritated by his reporting, which seems to me that he is informed almost exclusively by the people who are the putative, quote-unquote, moderates and reformers in Iran.

So that is his source. That's who he speaks to. And the wider kind of social strata that he's interested in are people who are broadly invested in the regime, but maybe think he could change things at the margins. And the whole worldview that comes across in his reporting is so much the worldview of the Iranian moderates and reformists and the type of think tankers that he always relies on for interviews fit the same pattern.

And so, yeah, I let him have it this time around because he had written a piece earlier in November where he contended it was a long feature, which appeared on the front page of the online homepage, that suggested that the Trump administration's bellicose rhetoric and threats to walk away from the deal had consolidated the people behind the regime or rallied them to the flag, so to speak. And he also blamed Saudi Arabia and its efforts to counter Iranian expansionism in the region for the same development. I just couldn't help it when then, you know, just a few weeks later, a nationwide uprising broke out just to suggest that his reporting does not match up with reality. It suggests it comes from a kind of ideological place.

So, Rob, that's what sticks out to me when I hear coverage not only from American sources, but say the BBC. I was listening to a BBC interview yesterday with a woman in London, an expatriate, and the interviewer was grilling her. He was antagonistic toward her because of her opposition to the regime and it seems as if among the intelligentsia of the west there's this idea that somehow the iranian revolution is this natural organic expression of the people instead of something imposed on the persian culture there and i don't understand why they have this sympathy towards it it may be just simply that they are instinctively guided to side with someone who sides against the West out of their own, perhaps a self-hatred.

Does that make sense to you? Or is there some other deeper explanation for why they seem so invested in the continuation of this regime? I think that kind of cultural post-colonial anxiety is certainly part of it. Another part of it is the fact that beginning in the first few years of this millennium, a narrative took hold, and it was pushed mainly by one journalist named Stephen Kinzer, who wrote this very simplistic, he doesn't read or write Persian, but a very simplistic account of an event in 1953 where partly through some degree of CIA and MI6 involvement, the Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown. It was much more complicated.

That movement actually had support from the broad segments of society itself iranians who worried that he was must have that was empowering communists including the islamists who later uh launched the 1979 islamic revolution were against musadab so there's no the is the current regime cannot use musadab as a grievance against the West because it supported the coup. But actually, can you hold – just to tarry on that point for just a moment because at least if you're of my generation, when you went through college, you heard over and over and over again, well, Eisenhower installed the Shah, you know. That's not quite – that's either inaccurate or the merest statement of a much more complicated picture. Is that right? That's right, and the best book for this is Abbas Milani's biography of the Shah, although there have been others which have been – they're called revisionist books because they go against the Kings of Narrative that the Shah was imposed against a, quote-unquote,

democratically elected Mossadegh, and that the coup d'etat was purely an act of outsiders, when in fact, as Professor Milani amply demonstrates, again, it had broad support in the society, including from the Islamists. So I think that's another factor in how reporters think about Iran. And I think a third one, frankly, is many of them, and I speak from experience because I've talked to some of them where when they privately speak about Iran, they'll say, you know, we went into Iraq and that was a disaster. So they have this sense of mission that everything must turn on the idea that there are moderates and hardliners in Iran.

There are the bad guys who are, you know, Islamist fundamentalists, but there are also others within a regime, within a regime that is constitutionally Islamist and anti-American and anti-Semitic, but there are good guys within it. And the way the cornerstone of U.S. policy should always be to find those moderates and empower them, even as the Iranian people themselves, in their chants, in their discontent, in their rhetoric, suggest that they don't make much of a distinction, that living under Rouhani isn't that much different from living under Ahmadinejad, the previous president, who was the troglodytes supposedly she was but but there are the the distinctions here the west makes much more of a of an issue out of them than i think the actual

iranian people do right and if you're again i mentioned my generation but ronald reagan was excoriated for supposing that you could draw distinctions among members of the regime in Iraq, the press during the Iran-Contra business, the press just pounded him. There are no moderates in the Iranian regime. You fool, Ronald Reagan. And now the press itself is saying, you fool Republicans. There are moderates. You must help. Anyway, sorry, I just can't resist pointing out a little historical irony there.

Well, the original sin of 53 is pointed out every time this comes up. What is the percentage of the Iranian population that's under 30? It's big, isn't it? It's two-thirds. Right. So these are people who did not exactly grow up under the whip hand of the Shah. But let's switch to current events. How do you evaluate the Trump administration's reaction to all this? Well, as Peter knows, I've been a, you know,

certainly when the election was happening, I was not an enthusiastic Trumper. But as a critic, I still have to be intellectually honest, and I have to say that they've been much better than the Obama administration, let's say, was in 2009 with the statements from the president's own tweet account, really, really eloquent speech on January 2nd by Nikki Haley at the UN, which then resulted in today's Security Council meeting, I believe is happening today. Vice President Pence's interview with Voice of America, clear support, the sense that, look, this is an adversarial regime. Whatever comes of this uprising, it's up to the U.S.,

both morally and for strategic reasons, to try to weaken the Islamic Republic. And you get that the people who are running the show now understand that. Could they do more? Yeah, I think some things. One would be to reform Voice of America and Radio Farada, which are supposed to be doing what they did, what Voice of America and Radio for Europe did under communism. But unfortunately, a lot of the people that they hire, I don't think it's any conspiracy, but they're just Iranians who have that same Erdbrink mentality.

And so there's far too much, for example, anti-Israel stories or anti-Trump stories on these outlets where you wonder why are U.S. taxpayers funding this? If nothing comes of this, if there's a spur to reform U.S. public broadcasting, that would be good. I think there could be sanctions on individual human rights violators that the U.S. could announce. If you're identified as a major human rights violator, we'll cut you off from world financial markets. That might change the mentality of some people in the security apparatus and make them rethink their support. But again, this could go on. I mean, we don't know. It could be a one-off thing that fizzles and then resurfaces 10 years from now, or it could be the beginning of a regime collapse scenario. So the U.S. role is essential because whether we

like it or not, the U.S. is deeply invested in Mideast affairs. And when it steps away from it, chaos follows. What is your sense of it? What is, uh, what is the avalanche potential here? What is the, what is the possibility that any day now we might wake up to see that the numbers had spiked again,

that there were now tens of thousands in the street. Not very likely. Is it your field? They've got the regime. Has it back under control or not? What, what, what do you think?

It's unlikely in the immediate term but what the demonstrators have shown is just the depth of social discontent and it's notable that it's not coming solely or even primarily from uh the urban middle class the type of people you know my family came from before we left the country right coming from the people who were supposed to be the base the the fiber of the revolution. This was a revolution of the dispossessed. The dispossessed are saying, we're still dispossessed. A lot of them are chanting Reza Shah, Ruhe Shah, which means Reza Shah, you know, bless your soul or long live.

Many of them were born after the revolution, but they had this sense, it's not like they're clamoring for liberal democracy as we understand it, but they want a sense of national dignity and they remember a time, at least from history, books or footage where you could be a dignified Iranian and Iranianism is not subjected to mullahocracy. So you would say the events in Iran over the last week or so would have, this may be a little bit of a reach, would have something of the same weight as Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland in 1979 in as much as don't expect regime change anytime soon,

but recognize that the regime has been shown by its own people to be completely illegitimate. The only difference, I agree with you in so far as you stated it, and the reason that I do despair sometimes is that these movements don't have a clear leader. That was like Pope John Paul II. So there's no Pope John Paul II, there's no Lekva Jensa, as far as we know. Or serious organization. I mean, at the end of the day, I think social media or whatever goes so far, you need cadres, you need

people who can organize to get people to come out at certain strategic points and moments and so forth, and it's all happening organically. And I believe in old-fashioned revolutions, you need leadership and organization. So Rob, listen, last question, and this is not a short question. This is a request for a teaser.

You're writing a book. Tell us very briefly, at least as a fellow convert, I don't think it's likely to be a brief, but just tell us very briefly what the book is about and when it will come out. And believe me, we'll have you back on when the book is out. Well, I'd really appreciate it. It's a memoir. It's due in February 2019 is when I have to write it, but I'm aiming to finish it this month or early February so that it can come out sooner. Whoa, whoa, whoa. We're talking to a writer who intends to turn in a manuscript a year ahead of schedule? Yeah, because I'm enthusiastic about this book.

It really is writing itself. I'm maybe halfway there. So if I can just churn out, you know, 750,000 words a day, it'll be done very quickly. And I hope, I mean, I keep telling various interviews that I'm going to do this in order to keep myself to it, but it's a, it's, it's a spiritual and intellectual autobiography. When I left Iran, I was, uh, I had decided that I was an atheist. And as much as I look to America as this great place to be, when I wasn't there, when I was longing to be there, when I arrived, I quickly became a kind of radical leftist. You know, I started with Nietzsche, who's not exactly a leftist, but then it led me to,

you know, Marxism and Hegel and things like that. So the book is really an account of how I went from that to appreciating Pope Benedict XVI's writing and appreciating Catholicism at a sort of aesthetic and intellectual level, and then ultimately convincing that it's the arc of salvation and being received into the church in December 2016. Wow. Well, we look forward to the book, and we look forward to talking to you when it comes out, and perhaps by then we'll be talking about a change of regimes in Tehran and the

effect that that would have on the Middle East. On the whole world, it would have a profound effect on the world. Thanks for joining us today, Sir Rob. We'll talk to you later. Thank you. Thank you, Sir Rob. When he was mentioning the youth of the Iranian population, when I was in college, I had a friend, an Iranian student, who was a very smart guy. Just funny, hilarious, cultured, world-weary, all of these

things. And when the revolution happened, he wanted to go back. This guy was as worldly as you can get, but he admired Khomeini. Khomeini was a great man. He felt some sort of religious obligation to go back. And he went back and then the war happened, the Iran-Iraq war, he disappeared. And I just, for years and years, we just imagined him swallowed up into this machinery, this extraordinarily westernized but Persian smart guy gone. And then about five years ago, we got a call. He was back in town. It was astonished. And we met at the old restaurant where we used to work.

And I said, Mehdi, what happened to you? You went back to Iran. We lost you. And he said, oh, I went back. It was horrible. I went right back. I moved back to Los Angeles just a month later. And he'd been in LA selling rugs ever since. Good for him. Yes, good for him. Because yeah, how would you want to go? I mean, for the people who did go back expecting some sort of paradise and found themselves – well, maybe for some it was paradise. Maybe for a great deal of others, though, it was the sort of hell you get when – I don't even want to try to make a transition here because it would be unfair to the people who suffered at the hands of the regime.

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you love him chief political correspondent for the washington examiner fox news contributor and the author of the vast left-wing conspiracy byron welcome back dc it's a flame it's absolutely gone mad with this uh with this Wolf Bannon book what's the fallout today? Gentlemen, how are you? Well I think we've seen a change from the beginning the first leak I shouldn't say this

the first strategic preview of the Wolf book was all of the Bannon stuff and that was pretty newsy to have Bannon attack the president, the president's family the way he did, suggest that the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower was an act of treason. I mean, it was really quite amazing.

And I think that Bannon is justifiably suffering a lot of blowback from that. You've seen candidates that he supports around the country, like Kelly Ward in Arizona, saying, Steve Bannon? Who's that? Oh, yeah, he was some guy who supported me. Plus, you've seen the Mercer family, the wealthy benefactors, pull back a bit. So that is that. But I think when the book came out and people discussed more about it, I think the tone is changing or the subject matter is changing to know enough or is not interested enough to be president. To those who argue that he's mentally unfit to be president. And they're fitting this into their 25th Amendment argument. And Byron, is there actually, I guess what I'm trying, so Peter here sits in California trying to understand the extent to which what's taking place in Washington is simply noise, something at which Washington is very good, and the extent to which, in fact, there are substantive arguments that are being tested for the first time or being returned to.

And this time it looks as though they may have more legs. So we've always known, anybody who's been paying any attention at all has known since the primaries at the latest, that Donald Trump was not a well-read or intellectually curious man, that he had a short attention span, that he watched the cable news shows, and that he liked to eat at McDonald's. So what in the current discussion of the Wolf Book seems to be new or to have legs that it did? As Cato Byrne used to say, thank you. That's exactly what we've known for quite a long time. And it's not really a surprise. The book, of course, focuses on those Wild West first early months of the Trump White House under Chief of Staff Reince Priebus,

in which there seemed to be no real order to things. I had one reporter the other day call it Grand Central Station at that time. And you read it and you think, wow, if Trump were smart, he would bring in somebody like John Kelly to help, you know, to restore some order here. Well, of course, that's exactly what he did. So, you know, in some sense, this is a story of the White House that ceased to exist several months ago. But as far as the president's personal traits are concerned, absolutely. A lot of that was litigated during the election, and it hasn't really changed. My feeling about this, my sort of personal opinion about this,

is that Trump, throughout the campaign and throughout his presidency, basically signals a set of policy preferences that his supporters like. I'm going to be tough on trade, I'm going to be tough on immigration, I'm going to bring your jobs back, this kind of stuff. I'm going to kick the hell out of ISIS. And they don't care, and he doesn't care, about the specifics of some of this stuff. But I think you saw from a number of year-end reviews, including one written by me, that there was a lot, you know, when you look back over 2017, there were a lot of things that a conservative would be pretty happy with, because Trump actually

did move in the direction of those instincts that he signaled during the campaign. Hey, so Byron, may I ask, you mentioned your own personal opinion, and this is a question I've been meaning to ask you, and it's a personal question. You are, for those who don't know you, you are an Alabama gentleman, you're a first-rate reporter, and you're tough in questioning and going after sort – I stipulate all that. But you're also an Alabama gentleman of the old school. You grew up in the South when manners mattered, when demeanor mattered. And everybody who knows you, gentleman, would be one of the first words they would use in describing Byron York. Somehow or other, even though you have been, it's your job to report on the character and person of Donald Trump, who is, if ever there

was an un-gentleman or a bizarro world southern gentleman, it's the non-gentleman from Queens. And you have throughout, even during the primaries, resisted, oh, I don't know, the Bill Kristol temptation to say, this guy, get him out of my face. He's just unfit in and of itself for the presidency. Why is Byron York not a never Trumper? Did you never feel the temptation? Did you think it through at some point and say, I won't give it? Why? Well, first of all, thank you for all those wonderful words. Well, we've got to get this recorded. Well, Southern Gentleman could get you thrown into jail sometime soon, you know.

I think during the – first of all, I was never a never-Trumper. And during the campaign, and I think I was relatively early, not the first, but relatively early to take Trump seriously as a candidate. I wrote an article in May of 2015 saying if what Trump were doing were being done by any candidate other than Donald Trump, it would be taken very seriously by the Washington commentariat and others, because by that time, for example, he had spent more time on the ground in Iowa than I think Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and somebody else, Chris Christie, put together at that time. He had more people working for him. He was getting more people to come to his rallies and things like that.

So I was watching him pretty early. And I think one thing that helps you take a candidate seriously is when you talk to voters and the people who come to his rallies or the people who come to other people's rallies. And they took Trump seriously. I mean, they were entertained by him. But what he was able to do in the course of an hour, an hour and 15 minutes of rambling talk in which he talked about his golf courses and his TV shows and the club championship that he's won and his buildings and all of this stuff, he was still able to give them a set of those policy preferences that we were talking about

that they came away with. I mean, he'd go on for an hour and 15 minutes. I would ask him later on, you know, what do you think Trump's going to do? And they'd say he's going to bring our jobs back, he's going to build a wall, and he's going to kick the hell out of ISIS. And it's like they got bullet points from this guy who was just talking all around the world. So I think if you listen to the voters, they were making sense of him in a way that a lot of the Washington commentary was not doing. And maybe it was because some of them just weren't going out and talking to people or not.

I don't know. But that just continued throughout the campaign. And I personally thought that there was something of an overreaction to him in some conservative circles. And then, of course, he secures the nomination and we're off to the races. So what I've tried to do, just as a reporter, is just basically view this thing down the middle. I don't think I have been blind to Trump's many flaws or the ways in which this presidency is completely unlike any previous presidency. But there have always been two levels with Trump. And in the case of his political career, the level that too many people pay attention to or pay too much attention to is the hair-on-fire controversy of the day,

which Trump himself stokes. But the other level is the one foot in front of the other policy stuff, things that are actually getting done by Trump or the people that Trump has appointed. And that's what we saw in some of those year-end assessments of Trump. You add it all up and actually look pretty good. Just to name three, Neil Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court. We've had the most important significant tax reform since 1986. And ISIS has been effectively destroyed. Not bad for a first year.

There you go. Not bad. And then you can add a lot of deregulation to that, which many people think is already having a positive economic effect. And not just Neil Gorsuch, by the way. A record number of circuit court judges was confirmed. Not just nominated, confirmed this year. And so, you know, those are, and then, you know, the pipelines, energy policy, there's just a lot of stuff that happened that I think Republicans, I'm not talking about Democrats, they wouldn't like this, but Republicans would be happy with were they not so focused on the hair-on-fire controversy of the day. James wants to take you hearing, puts it.

Because I was just thinking when you're talking about the two Trumps, there's the one theatrical entertainer. Then there's the one foot in front of the other. We were always told during the campaign that Trump would assemble the best people, that we didn't need to hear specifics because his mind, his managerial deal-making mind would apprehend the keen details, tease out what was necessary, and craft the great solution. It seems now that people are sort of resigned to saying, well, he doesn't really read very much and he doesn't know the details, but he points in the right direction and then that's sufficient. Is that fair to say that people are content with a Donald Trump that simply points to where we want things to go and is not necessarily involved in the details themselves?

Well, I would say when you say people, you have to remember there's a president with a job approval rating of about around 35 percent. So those people are. They're fine with it. But I think you'd have to say that a lot of other people are quite unhappy with it. I think on the, yes? I was saying they're unhappy with it because they believe that he's this strange combination of malevolent genius, dark racism, American passions unleashed, that he is intentionally crafting this American dystopia in which they will be forced into their handmaiden's tale camps and the rest of it. I mean they see him as far more brilliant Machiavellian and dark than the Never Trumpers do, for heaven's sakes.

Anyway, never mind that point. I'm being tendentious. We should probably get to the stuff that's coming up that you're there in. Yes, James, but you're beautiful when you're ten-punches. Let me say one thing to that, and I'll take a practical part out of what you just said, which was Trump during the campaign promised that he would hire the absolute best people, the best people to work in his White House. And I think the recent departure of Omarosa, the tenure of Sebastian Gorka or Anthony Scaramucci just indicates that

that was not true. Now, on the other hand, Trump has brought in a number of first-rate people. I mentioned John Kelly, Mike Pompeo, James Mattis, Naomi Rao, H.R. McMaster, Nikki Haley, Mark Short. There's a whole bunch of them who are really first-rate people. And amazingly enough, they tend to do fairly well when they're put in these jobs because they're good, solid, quality people. So I do think there's going to be departures after the first year of the Trump administration. There always are. There'll be more because of the craziness of Trump.

So it's extremely important that he be able to hire good quality people, which has always been a problem because there's so many of the Republican policy elites have been never Trump or at least strongly opposed to him. Well, it's great that the second year is turning out to be adults. I just wish the first year had not been this parade of St. Vitus dance-inflicted clowns. But we're done. We're moving along. There's still, however, Russia out there. Or is there? What's the Russia story?

Where does that sit today? Oh, you mean the investigation or the country? Yeah, the investigation. Here's basically what we have. You have three basic investigations you have the two intelligence committees Senate and House and then you have the Mueller investigation you also have a really interesting

one going on in the Senate Judiciary Committee as well but you know the House investigation is going to end up being a pretty partisan exercise. I think it's pretty clear you'll see a Republican report and a Democratic report.

Devin Nunes, in my view, the chairman, the much-criticized chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has actually shaken loose a lot of interesting information about the Trump dossier. And I think that that's very, very valuable, and I don't think we've seen the end of it, and I think there's going to be more interesting stuff to come out about the behavior of the FBI and the Justice Department. Byron, almost a technical question here devin nunes republican of the central valley here in california who's the chairman of the house intelligence committee and he has been pushing the fbi and the justice department for it seems to me months now they've been under subpoena for many weeks for information relating to the dossier and they continued well

you'll have to tell me what happened yesterday but they've been continuing to withhold information that this duly constituted chairman of the house select committee has been demanding and placed under subpoena what can he what can the committee or what can congress do to the executive branch to the the FBI, to the Justice Department, to force them to comply with the subpoena. I just don't know how it works. Yeah, a couple of things. If you look at this most recent letter from Nunes to Rod Rosenstein, basically the acting

attorney general for all of this stuff, the letter demands that the FBI and Justice Department completely fulfill the August 24 subpoena from the committee. So the letter was dated January 4th, and the subpoena it refers to was August 24th. Now, we should not act as if the Justice Department and FBI have not turned over anything. It has been pulling teeth, but they have turned over a lot, and the fight is over some remaining stuff. But they really didn't start turning it over until Paul Ryan got involved, because this is the case. First of all, Nunes was, as you know, weakened by accusations that he had leaked classified information.

That was referred to the House Ethics Committee, which basically semi-sideline Nunes for several months while it investigated before exonerating him and declaring that he did not do what he had been accused of doing. So Democrats and outside players like Fusion GPS could say, forget it, I'm not going to obey your subpoena. You're this weakened, lame duck non-chairman of this committee. Forget that. Well, first of all, he's now sort of fully the chairman again for this investigation as well. But also what he had to do, what Nunes had to do, was get the strength of the House of Representatives behind him. Because even if he had not had any problems, the executive branch could say,

that's one committee chairman, I know they're powerful, but maybe we'll see how far we can push him. But when the entire House of Representatives and the person of the speaker gets behind it, then they really start feeling the pressure. And a few months ago, you actually saw Ryan get behind Nunes and come out and specifically accuse the FBI and Justice Department of, quote, stonewalling. And they began cooperating more after that. Doesn't mean they don't drag their feet. They just do. But I think, well, I know, we had a meeting maybe two days ago between Rosenstein and

Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI. They both came over to Paul Ryan's office and talked to him. And I think this new last agreement that, yes, we're going to turn this stuff over is a result. Yes, Devin Nunes has been doing all the work, but there had to be muscle from the speaker behind it to make it happen. And now the muscle is there. Last question on this. Why doesn't the White House simply say this? We're talking about the executive branch of which the chief executive is chief executive why doesn't he say to the justice department and the fbi i'm not getting into the details of this investigation

but i hereby order you to comply with the subpoena from the house intelligence committee why hasn't that happened it's a good question uh and i think that the reason the white house has stayed out of it is that they just did not want to. Obviously, the president is a very interested party here, and in more than just a principled way, the president should be an interested party in having his administration obey congressional subpoenas. But I think they just, given all the drama involved, I think they just didn't want to get involved with it. And they felt, and I think they're correct, that ultimately the House could prevail on this. And we really don't know a lot of, we've talked a lot about

this whole newness stuff. We don't know a good bit of what has been discovered, and hopefully we'll find out soon. And just to make a quick finish to this answer, we have the more sort of conventional bipartisan investigation going on in the Senate, and not sure what that's going to turn up, but it appears to me that it's moving, again, away from the whole collusion idea and more into an investigation, what it should have been to begin with, just an investigation of Russian efforts to meddle in the U.S. election, what U.S. authorities

did about it, and how they can prevent that in the future. Well, the question is whether there's enough gas in this tank to get the Democrats to the 28 elections and overturn the presidency. I don't think so. I'm just curious what outrage they're going to have when this goes away. I'm thinking maybe it'll be environmental desperation, because now we have these new energy rigs that say they can drill off the shore of, well, anywhere, frankly. And I just imagine Rob Reiner at this moment looking out the window at his Malibu beach house

and weeping softly as he imagines oil rigs out there in the ocean, ruining his view and his life in the earth. Well, that's the future. We'll talk about that later down the road. Byron, thanks so much for joining us today. It's always a pleasure. Thank you for having me, guys. Good luck.

Is it cold in D.C.? Are they getting hit by the bomb storm? Do you know that, Peter? I don't know, to tell you the truth. I have a son in New York who was sending me pictures yesterday. I know they've got eight or nine inches even on the island of Manhattan. It's been accumulating. But in Washington, I don't know.

I want them to be snowbound for just weeks. I want the whole thing to collapse. I want people to realize that they should have stocked up on bagels and milk before. And I want to see YouTube commentary from haggard New Yorkers with a facial hair of Randy Quaid saying, it's hell here. It's hell. We have nothing to do. But by the way, if you do have facial hair like Randy Quaid, you might want to get rid of it because it's kind of bizarre. And that's where Harry's comes in.

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We'll leave with this. Did you make any resolutions for the year to come? Yet again, in 2018, as I have for a number of years now, I have resolved to give up broccoli. How's that going for you? So far, no problem. I don't know why all these people have talked endlessly about breaking their New Year's resolutions. I have no trouble keeping mine. What about you, James? I'm going to go to the gym their New Year's resolutions. I have no trouble keeping mine. What about you, James?

I'm going to go to the gym a little bit more often. And so far, it's been good. Jim runs the cigar shop in my building. Okay. We both took that one as seriously as we did. Actually, there is no cigar shop in my building. I wish there was. Just a place where you could go down Prager-wise and just sit in a leather chair and inhale the rich aromatic scents.

But no, there's no place downtown like that at all. What there is in my office lobby is Peace Coffee. That's what it's called. Peace Coffee. Peace Coffee. Peace as in the logo, as in Groovy Man, as in Peace Coffee. Yes. Serious – well, not in peace coffee. Yes. Serious.

Well, not serious question, but question. This never occurred to me before, but Minneapolis is, of course, connected by above street walkways. So people can get around town without having to step out in the cold. What do smokers do in the winter in Minneapolis? Die off like flies. They go outside and stand in four degree below weather and smoke. They do. I mean, all from time to time in the course of a day, if you want to consult a small cigar, and yes, you go outside and

you see all these people clustered around the buildings, great plumes of smoke coming from their mouths as they get the nicotine fix. That's what they do. But you're right about the Skyway system. It's quite wonderful. It allows us to not die in the winter. It allows us to maintain complete possession of all of our toes and fingers, which is great. I mean, you know you've got those pinkies, the little spares, but it's nice to walk around, to go to lunch somewhere,

and not have to shiver and dip your fingers in a bucket of hot water when you get back to the office because it's four below. And wouldn't you know it, there are some people who don't like the skyways because they suck the vitality from the street, don't you know? And granted, in the summertime when it's 90 degrees, people are up in the air conditioned skyways. But there's a certain group of people who want us all to be like those in iceland and finland and walking around outside being vibrant they want a vibrant bustling downtown and the person who's most enthused about tearing down the skyways tearing them down as you might not be surprised is uh is the son i think it's the of our governor, who himself is the scion of the great family that built this department store downtown.

So this is how the line goes. The family builds Target and the stores themselves, and then the son, not wanting to go into anything like retail or not capable of it, goes into politics. And then his son wants to reshape what we all want to do in the sense that we must conform to a new urbanist model of vitality. I got your vitality right here, buddy. Come and get it.

Listen, folks. Casper, Harry's, Tracker. You'll find the links on the Ricochet homepage. And go there. Save money. And thank them for sponsoring the podcast. By all means, go to iTunes and leave a review, preferably a good one so more people can find the show. And join Ricochet for Heaven's Sakes.

If you've enjoyed this podcast for $2.50 a month, you get the podcast here. You can comment. You can read all kinds of stuff, and you can experience what makes Ricochet different than any other site on the web. It's the member feed where people can come up with their own pieces. It's the conversation in the community. Right, Peter? That's what you guys were thinking about when you started this wonderful thing. Absolutely.

Well, Happy New Year, and we'll see. And next year, next week by the time we talk, the temperature should have gotten up to zero because I love looking at seeing zero and thinking there's just no temperature. We ran out. It's on backwards. Enjoy California. zero because I love looking at seeing zero and thinking there's just no temperature. We ran out. It's on backwards. Enjoy California.

Enjoy Ricochet 3.0. Folks, we'll see you there at the comments and we'll see you here next week. Next week, James, prospero año nuevo. Don't tell me you don't know what love is When you're old enough to know better When you find strange hands in your sweater When you dream both turns out to be a footnote I'm a man with a mission Two or three additions And I'm giving you a long look Every day, every day, every day

Every day I write the book Chapter one You didn't really get along Chapter 2 I think I fell in love with you You said you'd stand by me in the middle of Chapter 3 But you were up to your own tricks

And chapters 4, 5, and 6 I'm giving you a long look Every day, every day, every day Every day I write the book The way you are The way you talk and drive It's just me and the lab All of my paragraph

You can't say All your compliments And your cut-tick remarks Are captured here In my quotation marks I'm giving you a long look Every day, every day, every day Every day I write the book.

Every day I write the book. Ricochet. Join the conversation.