“Biden’s No-Win Problem”

Welcome to beg to differ, the Bulwark weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m ABy Stodder columnist at the Bulwark sitting in Fort Mona Terring. This week. We are joined as always by Bill Goldstein of the Brookings institution and the Wall Street Journal, Damon Langer, who writes the sub stack newsletter notes from the middle ground.

Linda Chavez of the Nazannon Center, and our guest this week is Tom Nichols contributor to the Atlantic. Welcome everyone, especially Tom. I wanna talk with Tom at the outset short term and then long term about Israel. This is not my area of expertise, so I did consult and collaborate with the great Ben Parker of the board. The last couple days on this.

I saw that Biden is strongly denouncing attacks on Palestinians and the West Bank and saying that this has to stop, and it’s pouring gasoline on the fire. We have this pause on the ground invasion plans, because of the concerns about our troops in the region and placing missile defenses where that can help. But, Tom, in the near term, what are the challenges in terms of Iran and us being dragged into a wider conflict the fate of the hostages, and then looking to a ground invasion, if the objective is not to control Gaza, what longer term for Israel, is the sort of least awful outcome? I know there’s a lot there, but you’re up to

it. Yeah. The least awful outcomes, you know, I’ll just add that I am not an expert on Israel and Hamas and the the Middle East struggle. But looking at this as a challenge for American foreign policy, this is the infamous Star Trek Kobayashi Meru test for Biden. It’s the no win scenario.

There has to be a response. I don’t think any leave Netanyahu out of the equation. I don’t think any Israeli government would not react and go in and hunt down Hamas after what happened. And I think the Americans in particular, even without a Biden administration, almost any rational American administration, which instantly excludes Donald Trump, but any other administration would say, yeah. You know, we understand.

We did the same thing. We had to go in and root out the people who attacked us. But I think Biden is doing as good a job as you can do kind of the way the Bush administration did in ninety one with the first gulf war. To ask our friends and allies, hold back. Don’t let it get ignited into a a wider war because one of the kind of creepy echoes I’m feeling is just as the Iraqis were hoping to spark a wider war in nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety one, there are clearly actors in the Middle East who are hoping to embroil the United States in this.

And, of course, the Iranians are one of them. So to not respond to these provocations that are obviously only maybe a step removed from the Iranians. It’s tough to have to tell the Israelis don’t lose control and go in and annihilate entire areas, you know, learn from us. Don’t destroy the village to save it. But given the political and military geography of where the terrorists are in Gaza, Again, it’s almost a no win scenario.

So I think the the immediate goal is to stand with the Israelis to try to provide them wise counsel about not overreacting to put enough force into the region, which I think is one reason you’re seeing these deployments now, where Biden has been sending significant naval deployments to the region. To say not today and don’t even think about it. But this would be a challenge for any American president, and I think this is one case where kinda glad the former chairman and the Senate Reform Relations Committee is actually handling this, but I don’t know what the least bad outcome is here other than not a large regional war. Which I think we can avoid, but it’s tough.

Yeah. And Bill Biden has been so careful and so strong. He’s been advocating for a two state solution and has defended Palestinian civilians He has separated citizens from Hamas and making the distinction, I mean, yet there’s been this powerful backlash. To Israel’s self defense on the American Left. And what we’re seeing particularly on college campuses is truly disturbing.

I’m just interested in your view of how bad domestic political problem this becomes. For Biden, he’s heading into a reelection camp pain with an already apathetic coalition. And there is an awful gallup poll out today showing he’s down eleven percent with Democrats just in the last month and with independence four points, bringing his overall approval down to thirty seven percent, This is quite a challenge. How do you see it? And will it matter a year from now?

It is quite a challenge. You’re absolutely right. And it could matter a year from now. If enough young people in the Democratic party are so turned off, that they tune out and either vote for Cornell West or don’t vote for anybody, that will make a tough reelection campaign for Joe Biden even tougher. Having said that, I do think that this will be an election driven by antipathy to the other side’s candidate more than it is by affection for Joe Biden.

And there’s some survey research to back that up. On the Republican side, the majority of Trump backers say that they’re gonna vote for Trump because they like Trump. On the democratic side, a majority of Democrats say that they’re gonna vote for Biden, not because they love Biden, but because they hate Trump. So I think in the end what I’ll call the dynamic of antipathy is probably going to keep the Democrats pretty united and, will mute, but not mute the impact of what’s going on right now. Joe Biden is doing everything that he needs to do.

He’s doing everything I believe that the United States needs to do. And if that makes certain portions of his party unhappy, I think he’s just gonna have to cope with that as best he can. There is really no alternative at this point.

And, Bill, it seems to me, it’s sorry for my leak assessment that Joe Biden can’t do anything right. I think he’s done everything right on Israel since October seventh. But does this mean because He gets some compliments from Nikki Haley and others on the right for standing strong on this that He’s going to be aided electorally by Republicans who see this as a very critical issue and sees leadership as excellent at this moment, or does he just pay a price with voters in his own party who have abandon Israel, really, and see this as a reason to stay home in the election. I’m just interested in your view also of the general sort of lack of rally around the flag. I mean, are we in an era where he could never get any credit from Republicans anyway?

As we faced the challenges that Tom was just outlining. I mean, we’re in really rough territory here. General Petrea said the other day that these challenges are worse than what we faced with ISIS, etcetera. I mean, in terms of the prospect of a wider war, we have this experience person with an excellent team making all these prudent moves, but can he expect to ever receive any political support or credit for that?

Well, the way in which you asked that question, AB, sounds a little despairing to me, a bit more despairing than I would describe myself as being. And I say that because every single poll indicates that about ten percent of the electorate remains undecided. And I think that some of those people, although they tend to be lower information, lower attention voters, are going to be influenced in a positive way. Some obviously will be influenced in a negative way. What makes the analysis so very complicated in this case is that I think at the end of the day, there are going to be three different independent candidacies with very different valances vying for the attention of the electorate.

And so we shouldn’t adopt a simple hydraulic model here where what doesn’t help Biden helps Trump or vice versa. It’s gonna be much more complicated than that in twenty twenty four. And so calculating the impact of any single vector on the overall parallelogram of forces is going to be extremely difficult. I’m not confident making that judgment right now. Although Biden is getting higher marks for his management of affairs in the Middle East than for virtually any other issue that’s being tested in public opinion surveys.

He’s still not getting a majority or even plurality of people approving of him. He cannot catch a break right now. But in the late fall of twenty eleven, Barack Obama was not a appreciably better off in the court of public opinion or in his job approval than Joe Biden has been. So I think we ought to be cautious about drawing inferences from present events for events that are still twelve, thirteen months away.

I’m heartened by your points. I’ll be looking at the polling. I guess I was just hoping to see some kind of uptick because of his management of this crisis. But perhaps in the long term, we’ll see that. And I think you’re right in terms of what will be decisive in terms of Biden’s vote next year will obviously likely have a lot more to do with Trump.

So, Damon, do you think that Americans except people who are furious on the left and people who are highly engaged on the issue of Israel and in this crisis, but maybe perhaps will not give Biden due credit for this. Do you think that people are paying attention? Do you think this break through, or is this the type of thing that you see Trump hoping to capitalize on, which is you just say Bulwark in any wars or crises when I was president. Do you think that Americans are paying attention on balance to to what just happened and how it’s being managed by the administration?

Well, I do think they’re paying attention now, and the extent to which they continue to do that and either give Biden credit or blame him will depend, an awful lot on what happens over coming weeks. Now immediately after the horrifying events of October seventh, people were talking as if You know, we’re gonna see a ground invasion of Gaza in days. People just thought this was imminent And that hasn’t happened, and it’s not always entirely clear to the outside world, meaning everyone out side of the White House and Biden’s closest advisors and the Israeli government. What exactly the calculus is here? Some people have speculated Biden’s said, you know, you can’t win.

There is no way to get rid of Gaza. Don’t go in there. It’s a mistake. You’ll repeat our mistakes in Iraq. But then you also see stories, like one that I just saw mid week, this week, and I’ll monitor that we have very clearly laid out to the Arab world that they better watch it So, you know, the US apparently explicitly told the Iraqis that we would intervene militarily on Israel’s behalf.

If Iran or Hezbollah intervened, and that we would also target the head of the regime in Syria. The commanders of armed factions in Iraq and Lebanon, vital targets in Iran, are we bluffing? Or does this mean that we basically have told Israel that they really should just hold off on the ground invasion until we have all our forces in place in the region so that we can follow-up on that threat or convince the powers in the region that we aren’t bluffing and they best not test it. So, I mean, I don’t have any answer to those questions, but it might become clear very soon as soon as those ground forces enter Gaza and things take that new turn. And so the question about how the American people are gonna respond, I will have to defer and just say, well, let’s see where we are.

In a few weeks, are we embroiled in not World War three, but a region wide Middle East war, where it’s the United States and Israel versus all of these other countries. And then If not, the governments of countries, then powerful factions within countries, that would be a big mess, and I like to assume there’d be a kind of rally around the flag effect that would help Biden, but I’m not so sure. It’s hard to anticipate in all honesty because, you know, as you indicated, AB, Trump made a big deal in his presidency about how oh, I’m ending the endless wars. And then when it comes to Ukraine, he loves to lay that at Biden’s feet and say, if I had still been president Putin never have invaded. So will he actually, you know, change course from the fact that he was very pro Israel or his administration was, and he helped broker the Abraham accords and everything.

So it sounded very pro Israel, very anti Iran and so forth. Would he turn on a dime and immediately attack Biden for taking Israel’s side in a shooting war? Why not? But Trump will do anything. I would never bet on saying he would not do something that he judged in a moment to be in his interest.

So those are so many variables that I really can’t even begin to to say what will happen. All I can do is what I just did sort of lay out all the conditionals and the various confusing paths forward from several of them depending on what happens.

Yeah. It’s too hard to imagine all those variables. So Linda, looking just at the near term politics of this, if you listen to Republicans, Yeah. A few of them said that they were disappointed or upset that former president Trump called Hezbollah smart and crapped on b b ness and Yahoo, but basically, they always circle back to the Biden administration’s posture on Iran, and it’s really easy for them to score political points and come back to the issue of Iran and our policy visa via Iran every time someone gives Biden any credit, not that that ever happens on Fox News, but where do you see this? I wanna just run that notion by you that I ran by Bill, which is or are we just at the point now in twenty twenty three?

Almost twenty Bulwark. We just don’t unite at these moments anymore and that Republicans are not gonna give and credit to Joe Biden who would be helped by their political support if he’s hemorrhaging support on the far left?

Well, we are a long past the period when there were conflicts abroad, and we said that, you know, partisan politics ended at the water’s edge. I mean, we no longer feel that way. We don’t see that kind of. Rallying around and certainly not gonna happen with trump supporters rallying around this president, but I’d really like to go back to some of what Bill was talking about. And that is some of the problems within the Democratic Party.

For Joe Biden in terms of this spreading conflict. Unfortunately, we’re gonna see a lot of pictures in the data to come and we’ve already seen some already of Palestinian and Children who have been injured by Israel banks. We’re going to continue to, focus on the humanitarian crisis that exists in Gaza. And unfortunately, you know, as as unhappy as I am with the right wing, mongo wing of the Republican Party, and I see it as enormous danger. I am also terrified at the left wing of the Democratic party and what I’ve seen in recent days in terms of some of the demonstrations, particularly things on college campuses.

Even here in the Washington DC area, projected up on buildings on George Washington University, the University of Maryland and elsewhere has been support for Hamas with phrases like from the river to the sea, which of course means the elimination of the state of Israel. And the left wing of the Democratic Party, there are elements within it that I think pose a real danger and pose a danger to this president. So it is not just that Biden has to worry about lack of support in Congress and elsewhere from Republicans. He’s gotta worry about his own left flank. And I think elections are not usually decided on foreign policy, issues, and I don’t think the next election will be either.

But if you have a drop participation by young people. If young people decide they’re not gonna come out and vote for Joe Biden because he supported Israel in this conflict. It could be a disaster. You’ve got the state of Michigan, which is, of course, a swing state with a very large Arab American. Population.

I mean, you’ve already had some supporters, Arab American supporters of president Biden who have said they won’t support him that time because of what he said. So it is gonna have domestic policy ramifications.

So Tom, let’s get back to another short lived crisis, but a crisis nonetheless, which was the closing down of a branch of our government for three weeks. We have a brand new speaker, Mike Johnson, who I’m delighted to report is going to accept the offer of the White House to meet in the situation room. Today for classified briefing on the hundred and six billion dollar supplemental request for emergency funds that the White House submitted to Congress that Republicans are all divided over and opposed to. But I think that that’s pretty interesting and and encouraging news. Speaker Johnson has told us that he is going to oppose continuing resolutions.

The new Republican language for those is called Stop Gap. So Speaker Johnson opposes continuing resolutions, but proposes to his conference a stopgap spending bill that will last either till January fifteenth or April fifteenth. They would like to get all of their Republican policy agendas into twelve appropriations bills, though they know that they won’t be passed by the Senate or be made into law. He is obviously headed to quite a twenty two days ahead before the government runs out of money. On November seventeenth.

Mike Johnson just recently voted for a Republican CR that made, like, thirty percent cuts to multiple agencies, and then he opposed the clean continuing resolution that McCarthy ended up losing his speakership over. What do you think the variables are as we look at the next three or four weeks with the brand new speaker of the house?

I sort of agreed with your first comment, which was, ugh, I wanna step back a minute to this Biden, no wind problem. There is a very weird thing happening that It’s almost like certainly among Republicans who are not gonna rally around any president except Donald Trump at this point. But there is a weird thing happening even among Democrats where it’s kind of like not hip to say Joe Biden’s doing a good job. It’s almost like they’ve internalized the notion that you just can’t say anything good about Joe Biden, that they’ve gotten from the Republicans and from the media and from Fox. And but even from other mainstream media that Biden just isn’t in control, and he’s doddering, and he despite the fact that there are no facts to support any of this and the actual record is quite good.

And I think this actually dovetails into the speaker issue because it basically says that people now have completed the transition that began years ago from judging politicians on results and policies and outcomes to judging policies and outcomes based on whether they like politicians.

Exactly.

And because they don’t happen to love Joe Biden. They say, well, the economy must be terrible. I don’t really like Joe Biden that much. Therefore, inflation must be out of control. You know, I mean, it’s in that sense I really feel for Biden.

I mean, there’s just nothing you could do. To overcome that. So I think in some sense when we talk about the political outcomes here and I agree with Bill in the end people are just gonna vote based on negative. He calls it the, Bill. I forgot what you call it.

Be kind of who hates who more. Political scientists just call it negative partisan right, that you’re just gonna vote for whoever the other guy isn’t. And I think that’ll probably govern the election and it may be enough, but that’s really a hell of a way to run a railroad With Johnson, you’re seeing the same thing. You know, this is just the latest installment of a long running show that was going on for the past six months called everyone hates Kevin. And, you know, it wasn’t that any one thing would be the poison pill.

They just didn’t like Kevin McCarthy, and they liked Mike Johnson, and I think I’m actually a little bit optimistic here. I think Johnson could come in and say, look, I talked to the president. I laid down the law. Here’s this stop gap. It’s gonna do x, y, and z, but I’m no Kevin McCarthy, and you can trust me on this, and people are gonna vote for it.

I mean, I maybe I’m overestimating the tribal solidarity of the Republicans, but I think they just wanted to kind of get through a bunch of people that none of them could agree on liking. And so they got a very, you know, kind of gentile smiling guy who I think is actually quite dangerous in terms of his political views who now can instead of calling at a continuing resolution, he’ll call it a stop gap instead of saying it support for Israel or Ukraine. He can say, well, it’s, you know, funding the defense budget for another six months or whatever he’s going to do. But again, I think that’s just a hell of a way to run things because it’s people in Congress and their constituents saying I don’t really have strong attachments to spending cuts or particular funding issues. I mean, this is basically performance art.

At this point. One thing I do wonder is whether Johnson is experienced enough to navigate his way through that because he’s just the least experienced speaker since the nineteenth century.

And we were just talking about how we appreciate that Joe Biden came to this moment with this crisis in the Middle East with all of his experience. And so, Bill, this is so interesting. I wanna associate myself with Tom’s optimism because I wanna believe too that in a fresh start with some rebranding and relabeling, they can do the things they need to do to not further their own crisis in their conference, but also bring the Congress to a halt or shut the government down and that they will play ball. It but pretend that they’re doing other things that, you know, are in keeping with their conservative agenda. How much does experience matter this is the least experienced Speaker.

He’s coming in. He’s only ever raised five hundred thousand dollars for each race. No more. He is only come in in twenty seventeen in the age of trump. He has this tiny staff that he’s gonna have to expand, I guess, fundraising when the Republican conferences in this much political trouble will be critical, not just the decisions he makes on votes, which could harm Biden district lawmakers in swing seats, but the actual act of fundraising, which is a huge responsibility of the top leader.

Kevin McCarthy, I read today, in two months alone, the summer, raised fifteen point three million dollars. So is this gonna be a setback for Republicans, even if Mike Johnson, like, lives to survive week to week? How much does experience in this role matter?

Well, to answer your question, AB, I think you’d have to distinguish different aspects of the role. You’re absolutely right about Kevin McCarthy’s prowess as a fundraiser. And I would be astonished if the new speaker got anywhere near what McCarthy was able to rack up when he really got going. But he may have some opportunities to parlay his credibility with the hard right into accomplishments that eluded Kevin McCarthy. And let me just give you one example.

Like everybody else, I just assumed that the freedom caucus and other conservatives would oppose continuing resolutions no matter who proposed them? What the name of the speaker was? Well, I heard a couple of senior representatives of that part of the Republican Party talking about it last night. And what they said was extremely interesting They said, we opposed continuing resolutions not in principle. Necessarily.

But because we suspected that McCarthy like some previous speakers was using continuing resolutions as a prelude to an omnibus at the end of the process, and that we will never accept. They went on to say that they were completely confident that Mike Johnson would try to use an interval of continuing funding in order to tee up and complete all twelve appropriations bills, which is what they promised their constituents and the reverse of what they invade against for all the years of continuing resolutions. So they trust him because they think that his aims are the same as theirs. And they never believed that McCarthy’s aims were the same as theirs. How far will that get him?

I don’t know. But there’s one other response I’d like to make to something you said Mike Johnson is strongly opposed to aid for Ukraine, and he’s made that absolutely clear in statement after statement. Does that mean that he is absolutely going to shut down the possibility of continued aid to Ukraine? Not necessarily. But I don’t believe that he is going to consider that issue in a package with aid to Israel and Taiwan.

I think he’s gonna break it off. And make it clear to the White House and his Republican constituents that he may be willing to deal on that issue, but only if he gets a big return on political investment in the form of new border security policies, as well as substantially increased funding for that per That’s his smart play, and I think that’s what he’s gonna do in the end. But, just to tie this up in a bow, he starts off with credibility in the portion of the Republican Party. It appears where credibility is most important these days. Namely, on the far right.

Come to think of it. I have one other point to make. And that is what we know about him is that he is a staunch social conservative. Most of the Republican Party, even on the conservative side, has made its peace, the same sex marriage. Not Mike Johnson.

Most of the Republican Party is prepared, I believe, to be pragmatic on the issue of abortion. Not Mike Johnson. If he runs the party off the rails, I think it will be by going much farther to the right on social issues than is good for the Republican electoral prospects.

Ukraine was my next question. Damon, there is, obviously, as Bill points out, increasing opposition to the defense of Ukraine in the House Republican Conference. Johnson is One of ninety three house members who voted to block Ukraine assistance in September, a hundred and twenty six Republicans joined with all Democrats to oppose. That measure that he supported. And we have a kind of new muscle flexing of opposition among senate Republicans now on this issue as well.

We know that senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, he’s been very strong on this issue, but not been running around to do cable hits of late. Took the Sunday shows to try to push for the coupling of security assistance to Ukraine and Israel in this supplemental. And also aged Taiwan, and he made the point that we are facing an axis of evil with China, Iran, and Russia. So you have these more mega adjacent senators who are getting quite loud about the separation of funds for Israel versus funds for Ukraine. Although, they don’t control the chamber, and it is not up to them to separate anything.

So JD Vance, Schmit Johnson Marshall Holly Scott, I guess maybe they could filibuster. But there is gonna be a real fight on the right about craneade, and where do you see this going that basically, the Democrats, what bill outlines makes the most sense, I think it would really help Biden politically to give on the issue of some new border policy. It’s a real political problem for him right now, the mayhem at the border, but Schumer is making it sound like Democrats are not gonna budge on that. Where do you see this debate going? Do you think there will be sixty in the Senate to keep the aid package together?

Oh, boy. Lots of details in that. And again, I sort of liken my answer to the first round of questions about Israel. There are almost so many variables. I don’t know how comfortable I am making specific predictions, but I do think it’s worthwhile laying out the trajectory of several of them, and and you’ve begun that very nicely in teeing this up.

I mean, we are dealing with the reality that the Republican Party is becoming and depending on what part of it you look at has already become very much skeptical about intervention in parts of the world for reasons that I don’t find particularly applicable, most Republicans seem to continue to be very wedded to support for Israel. I know a large part of that has to do with the evangelical support for Israel for theological reasons. There are, of course, very old American civil religious connections between, our understanding of ourselves as an experiment in self government with the idea of Israel being a chosen nation in the Middle East, and this goes back all the way to the puritans, in fact. And so There are always resonances in America when it comes to standing with Israel that ends up benefiting Israel a lot in the support that we offer them. So Republicans are still okay remaining engaged with the world if it means supporting Israel.

But this is the inexplicable part that I don’t quite grasp. There’s been a real turn against standing with Ukraine in defense of itself against Russia I think personally that this shows a real kind of poverty of strategic analysis on their part. I don’t grasp why they are failing to understand Russia’s motives here, what Putin hopes to accomplish the kind of mess that he is trying to make. Of the world and undermining the international order that America has helped to create and broker and defend for all of these decades and has served us incredibly well. But whatever the case, there is that faction.

Now the faction is much larger in the house, This is, of course, the people’s house, the one closest to the voters. And for no small reason, because Trump stirs up these sentiments against supporting Ukraine for reasons tied to his own bizarre admiration for the person of Vladimir Putin as a dictator and perhaps as someone who has helped to secure him some tasty loans down through the decades. Whatever the cause is, Trump stirs it up and the voters on the Republican side have started overwhelmingly to flip on this. Bill has, in recent weeks cited some of the polling data on this, where on most questions, depending on how it’s worded, were down around thirty percent support among Republicans. For continued support for Ukraine, and then that is gonna translate into very weak support, among Republicans.

Now as you indicated, AB, it’s also a little more complicated than that because there are different things that Johnson can do. He can refuse to, in the house, keep the different appropriations together. He can refuse a vote on the Ukraine part of the budget. Or he could say, look, I’m gonna vote against it. A lot of my caucus is gonna vote against it, but in return for some other thing that I get, from Biden and the Democrats, I will allow a vote.

And in that case, it would probably pass because the overwhelming majority of Democrats would support it. But will that happen the next time? We need to pass another appropriations bill for Ukraine a few months down the line. I grow in increasingly dreary about it the further we get into the future just because of the trajectory of those numbers and the poles. As long as, the Republican electorate is souring and soured on it as support is going to disappear.

And that will even eventually be true in the senate where you still have McConnell. You still have, I think, definitely a plurality. Of the Republican senators who still wanna support it. But eventually, that’s obviously, it’s always gonna be slower in the Senate because the terms are six years. It takes a for public opinion to catch up.

But eventually, it will catch up and the JD Vances are, I think, going to end up having progressively more influence and power the further we go.

Yeah. That is disappointing. To me as well as why I don’t really wanna think about the next request months out and what kind of wallet will hit. I was interested to see that Senator Cotton, who is of Mitch McConnell Lieutenant said that pairing aid to Ukraine and Israel was a nonstarter, and I thought that was pretty alarming. It might be just, you know, the opening bid.

But Linda, why shouldn’t the Biden administration give on some kind of border policy? To keep this supplemental package nice and robust and paired up together.

Well, it’s hard to know what they can give. I mean, the problem is the Republican solutions in terms of the border are non solutions because what they will not look at is actually changing laws, having to do with asylum, changing our legal immigration laws. And I will say the Biden administration has done some things recently. I mean, they are now trying to negotiate getting Venezuela to accept those Venezuelan who are deported. Administration sort of paired this with actually giving five hundred thousand Venezuelan in the United States, the ability to work, but said they had to have come before the end of July.

And those who come now face being deported back to Venezuela. So I think the administration is doing what it can, but everybody would like to see some change at what is happening at the southern border. What is happening is unsustainable. It is a free for all It is the exploitation of people who are paying tens of thousands of dollars to the cartels, to traffic them, to the border so that they can cross over into the United States and then hope to claim asylum here. That’s because our asylum laws are, in fact, broken.

They are not suitable to the kind of inflow that we are seeing now. Some of whom may be legitimate, asylees may be wanting to claim asylum in the United States for the traditional reasons, that we’ve seen in the past. But others who are simply trying to escape desperate lives in their home countries. And the answer to the Republicans is always, well, build the wall. You know, walls keep people out, but they also keep people in.

And one of the things that is really an interesting phenomenon over the course of the last twenty years or so is we’ve gotten better at border security. Our border is much more secure in many ways than it was twenty years ago. The difference is that in the past, people came in. Mostly male workers came in. They accepted seasonal jobs, or even if they weren’t necessarily in a seasonal kind of work when economic circumstances changed and and it was more difficult for them and we saw the economy going bad.

They left. They went back to their home countries. And by the way, they also left their families in their home countries. Now because it is so much more difficult to cross into the United States than it has been in the past. They come, they come with their families.

And once they get in, they don’t leave. All of that could be fixed if we had a real attempt to fix our broken immigration laws. But who is stopping that from happen? It’s the Republicans that have been stopping that from happening going back to George Shelby Bush’s administration. There were in fact, proposals on the table then that would have made changes that might have seen a very different American in terms of our ability to be able to bring people in legally.

The Democrats, you know, are always unwilling to talk about guest worker programs or having people be able to come in on a temporary basis. They want them to come, on a more permanent basis. And so they also throw a and have done so in the past. But this idea that the Biden administration can do something can give something to the Republicans that is gonna make a real change in what’s happening at the border. I mean, they can certainly give in on draconian things but it isn’t necessarily going to change the facts on the ground and the facts that people are desperate and that they see opportunity here.

And we, by the way, need them here. We need those workers. We are in a severe labor shortage. And our economy would benefit if there would be real change on immigration. So I don’t think it’s a matter of political reasons the Biden administration’s being unwilling to talk.

I think in real terms, if you’re really interested in solving this problem, you’ve gotta do it at a much more comprehensive way than the Republicans are willing to talk about.

And, Tom, how do you see the current debate over Ukraine among Republicans and where do you see it heading? And I wanna believe that the ones there are more of them than fewer. I believe in both conferences. In the Republicans of the Senate, the Republicans of the House, think they outnumber the Ukraine assistance opponents, but do you think that with the polls changing that they’re likely to waiver at this point with a speaker Johnson and increasingly a what do we call him presumptive nominee Donald Trump?

I don’t think so on the democratic side, but it’s fascinating how much the Democrats and the Republicans have finally completed their evolution of trading places on foreign policy, where, you know, earlier, we were talking here about you know, it’ll pass and with Tepid Republican support and it’ll be done on the backs of Democrats. That’s how we used to talk about defense bills and aid anti communist regimes during the cold war. You know, now it’s gone completely in the other direction that Republicans with this kind of no nothing isolationism have decided that Putin shares their cultural values, and they don’t really need to be sending this money. And Of course, the way they portray this to their voters is that we’re just dumping bags of money off in front of Zelensky even though what we’re actually doing is buying American products and keeping American workers making stuff. I think Democrats understand this, not because they are somehow old school cold warriors, but because people that actually look at this situation, understand how dangerous it is.

And I think one of the things that’s really striking here about the Republicans is they were once the party that argued that national security is incredibly tenuous in the international environments very dangerous. This is now the party that basically sees no danger overseas other than involvement in another Afghanistan. And even there, if Trump kills Soleimani, they don’t fear that, they don’t fear, you know, entanglement with a run. You know, again, it it speaks to a lack of seriousness among the Republicans about all of these issues that they kind of faint at it now and then to say, no, no, I have big foreign policy thoughts. But they don’t.

And one of the things I always find frustrating when we all get together and discuss these things is that we’re talking about policy as if the Republicans have these kind of deeply held policy convictions. And I think instead what they’re doing is they’re simply sort of farming their constituents to say, well, okay. You know, we couldn’t be totally against Ukraine early on, but this makes for a convenient wedge. And since Joe Biden’s in favor of it. We have to be against it, and then we can backfill the reasons that we’re against it.

And we’ll get help doing that from Fox and from, you know, the online ecosystem and all of that other stuff. But there’s a part of me that honestly believes that if Joe Biden had said, you know what? Ukraine’s terrible place, what the Russians eat them that tomorrow morning there’d be a resolution in the house saying Joe Biden is a traitor than NATO. Yeah. It just it is always opposite day.

But I think with Ukraine, that began. And again, as I said, you had some people in the party and particularly the folks in the GOP Entertainment complex who decided that this was a good wedge. Therefore, we must come up and back fill the reasons, especially because of the role Ukraine played in Donald Trump’s impeachment, which we should always bear in mind is always gonna be a part of Republican obstinacy about Ukraine. Yeah. Because they’re always gonna say, if not for Ukraine, boy, you know, if that guy had just played Paul, you know, we wouldn’t be looking as bad as we do now.

So I don’t think it’s gonna solve that much among Democrats, but I also think there are some Republicans who deal enough with classified material, who deal enough with foreign affairs, who kind of understand how much the world could go sideways if the United States just ends up taking a powder on all this.

Yeah. I I really hope the pro Ukraine Republicans find a way to stand firm. Bill, looking back at the last two years, watching Joe Biden make a forceful argument about the similarities between the two conflicts in that speech. I wonder, could he have influence public opinion more? Had he state engaged rhetorically on this issue.

Obviously, we remember the spring and winter from two years ago of you know, yellow and blue flags everywhere and all the Republicans in lockstep also trying to help fight against Vladimir Putin after the invasion, and now we are where we are. Do you think that the bully pulpit that this was sort of a missed opportunity and that they had and continue to engage the public on it, we would be seeing different sentiment in the polling about Ukraine.

Well, we’ll never know. Will we. But I can go this far down that road with UAB. I do think that until very recently, president Biden, under utilized the bully pulpit aspect of the presidency. I’m not sure why.

It doesn’t take that much energy to ask your staff to draft a speech to edit it very carefully for your own voice, and then to stay in the suit that you wore to the Oval Office in the morning or maybe change into a slightly nicer and fresher one and deliver a twenty minute speech. That’s a low cost way. Of being visible on a continuing basis on issues that matter. And I understand they were afraid that he would wear out as welcome with the American public. He’s not as maddeningly entertaining and unpredictable as Donald Trump.

And that if he spoke too often people would tune him out. I think they overcorrected for that. And now they’re starting to realize that they over corrected and that the president’s boy should be heard more frequently. I do want to qualify something that Tom said, please put a different thought on the table about Republicans and foreign policy. I think it’s very important to remember that after the second world war, Republicans were internationalists because they were anti communists and our chief enemy in the world.

Was Soviet communism. That began to weaken on the Republican side, almost as soon as Soviet communism disappeared. The Berlin Wall fell. Democrats were always more concerned about if I can steal a phrase making the world safer democracy on the grounds that a democratic world was safer for the United States. Proposition that I think is incontestable, by the way, even though Republicans contest it.

So that’s qualification number one. I do think that Republicans were sincere anti communist, but only fair weather internationalists. A second point, they don’t advocate withdrawal everywhere. And the ones who deign to make a strategic argument, in favor of their current stance have said that the real enemy is China and that we ought to focus all of our attention and resources on China because That is the enemy who can undermine us economically, diplomatically and militarily. So they do believe something But that’s something that they believe is far from what Democrats believe and I think is harder to defend analytically, but they do believe it.

Okay. Now we’re gonna turn to our highlights and lowlights of the week Linda. We’re gonna start with you.

Okay. I’m gonna harken back to our discussion at the beginning of the program, which was on Israel, and I wanna highlight what I thought was a terrific column in the New York Times by Brett Stevens. It was entitled the Palestinian Republic of fear and misinformation. And he talked about how quickly and how gullibly the American press was to accept some of the figures being put out after the supposed attack by Israel turned out not to be an attack by Israel at all on a hospital in Gaza turned out the hospital itself was not hit. There was a rocket that misfired that was set off by one of the factions within Gaza and ended up killing people.

But I think what he talks about is something that’s going to be extremely important in the days ahead. Because we are going to be seeing a lot of pictures of injured children, dead children, and it is really important to know where we are getting our information from. And just as the United States media would not accept reports coming out of Pyongyang about what is actually happening in North Korea. We wouldn’t accept the Iranian regimes reports on what’s happening inside Iran. We have to be very careful, particularly in Gaza, that many of the sources of information are really, Hamas.

And so I thought it was a terrific column and well worth reading.

Thanks, Linda. Okay, Bill.

I do have a reputation well earned. I’m afraid for being the village EOR, but I’m gonna surprise everybody by having a highlight as well as a low light this week. I’m also going to surprise people. I hope by highlighting something in which I was myself involved. Every year for the past fourteen years, Brookings and the Public Religion Research Institute have teamed up to produce something called the American values survey, which probes deeply into Americans attitudes about culture, religion, and political first principles.

It looks into the sorts of things, the subsoil of policy positions and political preferences. We just came out with our fourteenth and latest few days ago. It’s entitled threats to American democracy ahead of an unprecedented presidential election. You can find it both on p r r I dot org and at brookings dot e d u. And I commend it to everybody’s attention.

Now having finished the unpleasant business of advertising for myself, I turned to my low light, which was a no brainer. It was the speech on the situation in the Middle East delivered by UN Secret Podcast General Antonio Gutierrez who managed to frame the conflict in a way as to create in the minds of many listeners the sense that he was trying to excuse or at least equivalence away the Hamas slaughter of innocence. Israel was inevitably and properly outraged. So were a lot of other people. The Israeli ambassador called for mister Terriss’ resignation, that’s not going to happen.

But I think we learned a lot about the mindset that he’s bringing to his tenure as Secret Podcast general, and it is clearly not a rock on which we could build much of any of our policy regrettably.

Phil, thank you. I am really looking forward to the American value survey and I’m glad that you sheepishly highlighted that because it’s gonna be very valuable to everyone. So take the time to look it up. And, Damon?

Okay. Thanks. Like Linda and Bill, my mind has been focused pretty intently on the situation in Israel over the last few weeks, and I’ve read lots of interesting illuminating stuff. And I’m actually going to, you know, make the questionable decision of actually highlighting something from Elon Musk’s little play thing formerly known as Twitter, now known as X for some reason, showing that, occasionally, you can still find some interesting things there. This is actually a pair of posts, I guess, they’re now called rather than tweets, and they’re actually more like two pieces of a decently length essay by an author named Hussein Abubakar mansour.

Who is, as the name implies, an Egyptian Muslim, who is actually an extremely thought full commentator on issues related to the Middle East. He’s friends with many Israelis as well as many Arab Muslims And this pair of posts that he did, you’ll find them if you look up his name and look for posts from Wednesday, October twenty fifth. It was around one in the afternoon that these went up. Very thoughtful reflections on the state that Israel is in a lot of empathy for their situation, as well as an m as a lot of empathy for Palestinians and Gaza and the culture in which they marinade that involves so much hatred of Israel and Jews more generally. But it also has a kind of deeper insight and criticism, again, made in friendship to, I think, both sides in a way that it just simply is the case that both sides have gotten probably a little bit too comfortable with their own situation, their place in their mutual hatred for each other, a kind of acceptance on Israel’s part that There is no government or public opinion among the Palestinians that will allow a peaceful settlement and similarly on the part of the Palestinians that there is at the moment no Israeli government that’s particularly interested in negotiating over anything.

Each of them have very good reasons to hold the positions they do, but they both have grown sort of at least until October seventh, somewhat complacent in that frozen status of the situation that then blew up so, murderously, on the seventh. And it’s a kind of plea I think that when the current bloodshed finally does begin to recede, that hopefully the two sides can finally start realizing, you know, we can’t just go back to something like that hard cold peace that we’ve been living for the last decade or so since peace negotiations broke down and need to push forward. And again, this is not some feel good exercise on the part of it’s a deeper reflection than one might expect. So I highly recommend

Yes. Hard to find balance perspective on this. Indeed. Thank you. Tom.

My, highlight and low light are related the highlight is a really small one. I just sort of enjoyed that judge and Geron in New York saying to Donald Trump. I don’t find you credible. That will cost you ten thousand dollars. Now that’s, you know, pocket change to Trump, but it was nice to realize once again that in a court, you simply can’t create your own reality.

The low light was that when this was reported by NBC, you saw the reaction on social media among Trump supporters who basically said this didn’t happen. And it reminded me again that we have reached a pleat epistemic dead end with millions of other Americans that we simply, you know, you can have arguments about, was this a good idea or a bad idea? Is Trump guilty or innocent? Is there snow at the North Pole or isn’t there? But you can’t argue with people who say this just didn’t happen.

I mean, I know we’ve talked about this over the years. We’ve seen it happen, but I guess I was just struck by how quickly this report about Trump storming out of the room with you know, the secret service trying to run after him. It was just kind of an unpleasant reminder to me that no matter what happens, There will be millions of Americans who say, I just don’t believe it. Just didn’t happen. From one this one very small moment, it was just a reminder to me of just how much trouble we’re in.

We’ve all had these conversations. I’m sure where you say to someone, you know, something that you think is obvious, and they say on my planet that didn’t happen. So I thought it was kind of amusing and a nice relief to have a judge who clearly has no fear of Donald Trump whatsoever telling him that he was full of malarkey But it kind of terrified me to realize again that millions of people will say, I create my own reality and I don’t care what actually happens in the real world.

Is so true. Just thinking ahead to the court scenes of next year, if it’s not actually televised, what people will just disregard and not believe is kind of terrifying. I’m going to finish. I’m gonna highlight two things this week. One is, four point nine percent third quarter growth.

And that is great news for the Biden administration and for the country, but CJL’s triad today in the bulwark about how the public just makes no connection to how strong the economy is right now and how they are actually feeling. I also wanna highlight something that just absolutely delights me, which is that forty one states are suing meta formerly known as Facebook because Facebook and Instagram were designed to be addictive. I’m just one of these people who is sick about what social media has done to our young people and our future grown up people in this country, and I’m really, really happy to see some accountability coming. I also wanna thank the production team and give a shout out to Jim Swift, who produces the beg to differ podcast and to John Siri who edits it. Mona will be back next week, and thank you all for joining me.

On Beg to Differ differ.