Charles Fain Lehman, Jesse Arm, Judge Glock, and Renu Mukherjee discuss President Trump’s threat to send National Guard troops to Chicago, Baltimore, and New York; the government’s stake in Intel; and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s attempt to bench press 135 pounds.
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Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are Jesse Arm, Judge Glock, Renu Mukherjee, all inveterate panelists, all from the Manhattan Institute, all frequent contributors to City Journal. Thank you all. I feel like by now everybody knows who everybody is. If you don’t, welcome to the podcast for the first time. You’ll get a sense of the personalities real fast.
I want to take us into the story that we’ve been following for a little bit on here that really continues to grow. Last week, President Trump said he was considering sending more National Guard troops into Chicago, New York, Baltimore. There’s been pushback from leaders in all those cities, but in response to his deployment in D.C., that obviously got a lot of criticism. Democrats have charged Trump with having some nasty ulterior motive like, you know, I don’t think he wants to use the National Guard to conquer New York City. I mean, that is the theory of the case. It’s like it’s, allegedly fascistic.
You know, at the same time, I want to talk about this on two levels. One is I’m interested in the, you know, the prudence of this policy. Like, is this a good approach? Do we like the idea of the feds getting more involved in public safety? I feel like Judge and I can disagree about that. And then two is also the politics of because I think this is really interesting thing for the Democrats where public safety is a losing issue for them and so they can’t really position themselves as being against public safety. So they have to argue that Donald Trump is actually being soft on crime by sending in the National Guard. I think that’s another interesting angle. But let me throw that out to the panel. What do we make of the latest development in this story? What’s going on with Chicago, Baltimore, New York? Does this make sense as a strategy?
Judge Glock: Jesse is a former resident of Detroit. Aren’t you a little sad that your hometown didn’t get name checked here, at least as far as I know? The real murder capitals Detroit, St. Louis, you know, Memphis, they don’t get their National Guard troops. I bet somebody at least is feeling left out.
Jesse Arm: Well, I think the Democratic governors are bringing up Memphis and St. Louis all the time. And I think, by the way, they’ve kind of got a point. If big blue cities have crime epidemics that are going on unchecked and the red state governors that govern those big blue cities are not stepping in to manage this crisis, well, I feel the same way that I do about crime in D.C. or Chicago.
In D.C., we’ve obviously got a pretty unique circumstance. It’s the nation’s capital. Everybody, all Americans pay tax dollars that end up impacting the situation of the District of Columbia. And obviously, even spelled out in the Constitution, the president has a hand to play here. But I feel similar to the way I do about all big cities, Judge, to answer that question. So Detroit, you know, there’s not enough people in Detroit, though, for there to be enough attention these days. It’s a city that was built for way more people than actually live there.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, think part of what’s interesting, you know, Judge’s point is correct, or part of the point is like, the administration is not focusing on high crime cities, right? I mean, it’s not focusing on like the highest crime cities, which are these blue cities in red states, particularly in the south, where you have relatively low city spending on cops, you have a lot of guns. And so those two factors combined to a place like Memphis, where I’ve said this, I think, elsewhere, but if you go to any other city in Tennessee and talk to people about what they think about Memphis, everybody has a horror story about their experiences in Memphis. But I think, you know, yeah, there is there’s obviously sort of a punching bag angle where Trump is going after New York, Baltimore, Chicago, trying to raise the salience of sort of bad blue city governance in bad in blue states where it’s not so complicated. And then at the same time, it’s like many of these jurisdictions don’t have the fiscal constraints imposed on them that blue cities do in red states, separate from their bad governance. Like it is entirely on them that they have serious violent crime problems, particularly a place like Baltimore, particularly a place like Chicago that has a serious violent crime problem. And so, you know, I’m not sure the remedy is the right one, but it is, you know, like, and this gets to my disagreement with Judge, like if these jurisdictions are failing to provide their citizens with the basic right to public safety, somebody’s got to do something about it.
Judge Glock: No, and I think like, to be clear, I’m okay with the federal government deploying troops sometimes when there’s a real issue. Like we’ve deployed National Guards, obviously dozens of times when there’s riots, when there’s local opposition carrying out federal laws. I think Trump was very much in his rights to use the National Guard to protect ICE officers in LA. Like that was a federal duty that local officials and the populace was trying to prevent. Let’s bring the federal guards in to try to carry out the law.
Here, part of my confusion is like, I actually don’t know exactly what they can do. Like to be clear, right, they can’t arrest people, right? The National Guard can stand there with their…
Charles Fain Lehman: The National Guard cannot arrest people. Right.
Judge Glock: Yeah, they can stand there with their rifles and sit in a Bradley personnel carrier, but like, what are they going to do in all these cities except stand around? Like standing around is not the worst thing in the world for them to do. It also means like that, the caterwauling from the left about a fascist takeover looks even more ridiculous. They’re really just mainly standing around. But that also means like the actual effects on this are pretty minimal. D.C. again, you did have the clear argument. This is a federal city. The federal government has direct responsibility under the constitution and under the laws. These things, I just don’t get what the point is.
Renu Mukherjee: I think I’m sort of in between, like you, Charles, what Jesse and Judge are saying here, because on one hand, I actually saw earlier this morning the D.C. Police Union released the most recent stats on which different categories of crime are down in D.C. And while violent crime is down, assault with a deadly weapon is down, the two areas where crime is down the most are actually robberies and carjackings. So, you know, this isn’t violent crime, but it’s crime that’s deterred, obviously by more policing by the Metropolitan Police Department, but also by the presence of perhaps National Guardsmen and women just standing around keeping an eye on things. At the same time, I think I was listening to an interview with various Democratic governors yesterday actually. something that I fear is that, you see this example happening now with Trump, and I think perhaps we as conservatives ought to be wary of and be cautious of is that in 2028 or 2032, what if a president, a Democratic president, and it’s going to sound ridiculous, but I’m still going to say it, declares a trans emergency, for example, in Dallas, Texas.
I was reading, Philip Wallach had this essay in National Affairs in summer 2020 called “Crisis Government,” and it’s excellent. And in that essay, he points out, there’s two type of crises that would we say is in an active government Congress will respond to. One is sort of a shock to the system, like the Cuban Missile Crisis. But sometimes it’s the perception that a social problem needs to be addressed for political reasons or it’s gotten out of control. In a situation like that, very much in favor as a D.C. resident of what Trump has done in D.C. And I think there is a strong argument for intervention in places like Chicago, Baltimore, Memphis, et cetera. But what if someone comes in in 2032 and says, you know, children can’t get trans surgery?
Jesse Arm: I mean, that did happen. We lived through that during COVID, right? We had long, prolonged forced closures of schools. Democratic governors around the nation declared it wasn’t safe to go outside and live your regular life, but in red states, you could. And the results of that were kind of a restored trust in Republican lawmakers to lead in a lot of parts of this country.
I think we also have to couch all of this in the fact that like to the extent you’re seeing a pushback on the National Guard’s presence in D.C., D.C. is an incredibly unique place. Kamala Harris won over 90 percent of the vote here in 2024 for the presidential election.
Charles Fain Lehman: Ninety-three, I think.
Jesse Arm: That was an underperformance relative to Joe Biden four years earlier who did closer to 95 percent. It is a wildly liberal place. To the extent there are conservative people in the district at all, you know, they are something like 5 percent of residents that voted Donald Trump or they’re commuting in from the suburbs.
Charles Fain Lehman: One of my favorite stats on this is the Washington Post did a poll of people’s perceptions of crime, and they have one from May and they have one from August. The only thing that’s… Crime has not declined precipitously in that three-month period. It’s just Trump. And between May and August there was like a 20-point shift in how unsafe people felt in D.C. This is clearly entirely partisanship.
Jesse Arm: People also lie. I mean, they say they don’t care about crime or they say they subscribe to what Rob Henderson has described as luxury beliefs like defunding the police or cutting crime, you know, defunding the police in order to cut crime as backwardly as that sounds. You know, they hold these beliefs in theory and then they go back to a Georgetown townhouse or whatever and, you know, live removed from all of that disorder because they live in a part of town that doesn’t have a metro stop at it.
But more realistically, and to the point, I think that, I don’t know, these folks get on the metro and just like I did literally yesterday, I texted you about this, Charles, and a number of you guys, when there’s a mentally disturbed person on the train blasting music very loudly from their phone, one transit, I didn’t see any National Guardsmen as much as I would have liked them in that moment, but one transit safety officer walks up and says, please turn that down. He does it for like half a second and then walks to another part of the train and continues blaring his music. That transit safety officer sees him do that, does that, but doesn’t want to engage further. Another transit safety officer gets on the same car a little while later, asks the guy once, turn down your music. He does it for half a second, turns it right back up. Transit safety officer presses him again and this guy blows up, explodes. “F Donald Trump, F the president,” in a totally unhinged breakdown. And then what do I watch? All the kind of white Washingtonian people reading their book, close up their books, get up, move to another part of the train or get off the train entirely.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right and I think you know that that that is the thing that’s mobilizing for people. That’s things mobilizing people in D.C. or in New York City, or even in these jurisdictions that are, you know, somewhere like New York that is objectively pretty safe. Nobody wants to be on the train in a situation like that, right? You’re in an enclosed space. You feel trapped. Somebody else is using the space for their purposes in a way that is anti-social or harmful to you, or even just sort of, you know, is intimidating and indicates a possibility of subsequent threat, right? Like, the American legal system has long recognized intimidation is its own harm, and that’s what’s going on here.
But this gets the other point about you know what the federal role is. I mean, I think when you think, another argument for these big blue cities, going after these big blue cities, is that in many ways they have abdicated their basic responsibility to attempt to provide their citizens with public safety and public orderliness, right? They, like, consider it a policy commitment to say, we’re not going to prosecute criminals for many offenses. We’re not going to deploy cops to solve problems. We don’t consider this to be our job. If you’re uncomfortable, you’re A, out of luck, and B, probably a racist. I think in that situation, to Judge’s point, it’s like, who else is going to step in and ensure a basic right to public safety other than the feds? Or this, to Renu’s point, I think the Pandora’s box of federal intervention for federal priorities has been opened pretty decisively. It was, you know, 60 years ago, 65 years ago. I think in general that was good, like I’m pro-integration, so I’m in favor of that. But like, we’ve done that for what are, what we then perceived as progressive priorities. I’m not sure, you know, is this really going to be the thing that’s decisive for sending in the troops to make sure there’s a provision of transgender care for six-year-olds? Not obviously, it’s not obviously this is going to make a big difference. And at the same time, you have this other compounding problem.
Judge Glock: But to Charles’s point, maybe like that ship has sailed. Like the federal government can do this. Like, I don’t think that’s the debate. The interesting thing to me about this whole thing is like so many debates during both the Trump 1 and the Trump 2 era, there’s some position that is taken by Trump and the actual concrete effects in this are much more minimal than anybody wants to admit either pro or con. Something happened like, hey, let’s deploy National Guard to Chicago, Detroit, wherever. What happens is people stand around with guns for a few weeks, maybe a few months, which is…
Charles Fain Lehman: Which is a deterrent! Which is a deterrent!
Judge Glock: Again, like you can say that’s a good thing, a bad thing, but actually the effects are, we all admit probably going to be minimal. They can’t really do the things that these cities should do to get crime under control, which is arrest people, throw them in jail, prosecute them, et cetera, et cetera. But then the, the genius, this is where Trump ends up winning these arguments is that the position, the counterpoints that the left takes on this is, well, crime is not really an issue, which is again like the worst part, or they point to what I was kind of joking out at the beginning, which, hey, didn’t you know Memphis is slightly worse in its murder rate than Chicago? And rightfully most normal people think, well, who cares? Like, does it matter if you can find some town somewhere or other that has a worse murder rate? I don’t like murder and I want someone who’s indicating they want to stop murder. And that’s what a lot of this debate is ending up to be about.
Even us, we’re talking about like, yes, I don’t like the nut job on the D.C. Metro screaming. Like, maybe a National Guardsman can prevent that or like, just be hanging around, but he actually can’t do it. Most of them can’t do anything. And so this is going to be another tempest in a teapot. Like, cries of fascism on one side, and cries of us like finally bringing order to these cities and the others. What’s going to happen in two months is basically nothing one way or the other.
Charles Fain Lehman: I was going to disagree, but I thought Jesse was going to disagree.
Judge Glock: You disagree, Charles. You fight me on this one.
Jesse Arm: You disagree first. Charles, you give the wonky version of disagreement and I’ll give you the normal guy just like, what are you talking about? Disagreement.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yean I mean look, I think that deterrence matters. I think that also two things are true, right? One is that deterrence matters. It has an effect on the margin you drop National Guardsmen in a place, there’s going to be less crime in that place at least short run It would be ideal if you could then sort of like coordinate with the people with actual arrest powers. They aren’t currently doing that. There are lots of things that the feds can do. They can prosecute people. They can’t arrest people. You need some degree of coordination. You have to find a partner. But like you can make it happen. And this is other point is just like, and this may be Jesse’s point, prior to this event, half of residents of the district said that crime was an extremely or very serious problem. Like everybody sort of knows that this is an issue. And so even if it is just a political stunt, it’s a political stunt that is raising the salience of, you know, there are people who identify these as serious crimes, a serious issue in their communities and in the city around them, and their leaders are not doing anything about it. Why aren’t they doing anything about it? You know, if a positive outcome is that the D.C. city council gets 20 percent tougher on crime, I will consider that a success, even if there are no more total arrests. Or, you know, Brandon Johnson is turfed for a more tough on crime alternative in the next election. Mayor of Chicago. I will consider that a success.
Judge Glock: Yeah, but if they do for, Charles, to your point, then we need to try out Trump promise to randomly deploy the National Guard so we can find the marginal effect of the deployment on crime in these areas.
Charles Fain Lehman: We’ll be able to do that.
Judge Glock: They could put it in a big, they can do the old Vietnam War style draft thing and pull the balls out. It’s like, sorry, Nashville, you’re going to get the National Guard. Then we can see the actual effects. I think they’re going to be minimal. think like you could be right. Like if there, if we could actually do something to stop crime in these cities, I’m saying, okay, fine. Let’s do it. I don’t think this is going to do it. D.C. is an exceptional issue. have the federal government needs to have control there. That’s distinct.
Charles Fain Lehman: Jesse, thoughts?
Jesse Arm: Okay, but isn’t there also manipulation going on with like the D.C. crime stats to begin with? Like that’s an ongoing controversy with the Metro PD that’s being looked into. And I’m not trying to be conspiratorial and say that that throws out the entire argument or anything, but I’m just seeing like across America really, you’re pointing to year over year, maybe declines marginally in violent crime, but that’s not accounting for all of this widespread disorder. That’s not accounting for the fact that still you’re looking at over the course of multiple decades, very long highs. I think I just saw the Chicago’s leading the nation in homicide for like 13 straight years. So it’s not like, you know, you’re totally picking Chicago out at random here. It’s the nation’s leader in homicides and it’s an important large city. And it’s also like a key example of Democratic governance failure because it’s like, once again, the crime is concentrated in one part of town where the elites don’t live, where a population of people who consistently vote blue no matter what, and no matter how bad their social services are, no matter how bad the crime situation deteriorates and gets. So it’s easy for Democratic leaders to wash their hands of it and say, we welcome no federal intervention. We want nothing further to happen here. I just saw this, know, a kind of absurd New York Times op-ed that I think was written by Arne Duncan, a kind of prominent Chicagoan and President Obama’s Secretary of Education, I think.
Charles Fain Lehman: Education.
Jesse Arm: And yeah, the Dems are really going to run with this as like a national argument, like more efforts by the federal government or really by any government official to stop crime by intervening with law enforcement officials is the wrong approach. And that is so backward and counterintuitive to the median voter. Some political analyst or observer I read recently, and I apologize because I don’t remember who it was that made this point, said that until, maybe Charles will remember, but until Democrats stop being the political faction associated with disorder, that they’re not going to be able to achieve the rebrand, right? It’s not about abundance, it’s not about your economic policies, it’s about the permissiveness with respect to issues like homelessness, drugs, crime, and across the board I think Democrats still want to view themselves and left-of-center Americans and even maybe a majority of Americans have a Libertarian streak in them want to believe in bodily autonomy with respect to drugs and all of these things but it goes back to that point about all the people closing up their book and moving to the other end of the metro car or the subway car when they’re encountered with it directly in their face. All these people want to believe these things in theory, but in practice, they’ve got zero tolerance for it and they’ll be the first people to call up the cops.
Judge Glock: I agree with Jesse, just the Democratic argument that we’ve only had a few hundred murders in Chicago last year is not a winning argument.
Jesse Arm: Right.
Charles Fain Lehman: Only a few hundred bodies. Right. I want take us out. So, you know, one question for me is basically how far this is actually going to go? Like maybe, you know, Trump is just sort of posturing whatever. So let me ask very concretely, do we expect there to be National Guard troops deployed by the president in New York City in the next year, let’s say? Renu, what’s your take?
Renu Mukherjee: In New York City? I’ll say I could see it happen. And the reason is because it seems like this time around, the gloves are off with sort of everything.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, okay, fair enough. Jesse, National Guards, New York?
Jesse Arm: Well, wouldn’t it be the first time? Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York deployed the National Guard to address crime in the subway system in the city, I think in like March of 2024 with some 750 members or something like that, and then expanded it in December for the holiday season. And I think that was tied to a certain election that might’ve been going on in New York.
I’m sorry, even earlier she deployed the National Guard as well. So again, this is something that is not completely foreign. I wouldn’t be shocked if the president tries to make maneuvers around that as well, but people should have long enough memories to say that the Democratic governor was deploying the National Guard in the city not too long ago.
Charles Fain Lehman: Judge?
Judge Glock: Not New York, he’ll probably deploy it somewhere or other. I do think people haven’t appreciated that some of the military brass is going to be a little upset if the National Guard get overused across America. They do want to preserve readiness and they don’t want too many people called up. But that’s an issue that we’ll see if it actually gets to that point.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I’m ultimately skeptical that we’ll end up in New York. I think we might see a Chicago, we might see a Baltimore, one at most, but then they’re going to get, I suspect they’ll get bogged dowm or they’ll move on to something else, but make the point to move on.
All right, I want to take us into another story from last week very briefly. The White House announced on Friday that it had taken a 10 percent stake in American chipmaker Intel. I don’t know if people remember Intel. They make processors for the computers.
Big, big American company that does this. deal comes as Intel has struggled to catch up with competitors like Nvidia amid rising demand for processors driven by the rise of artificial intelligence. Some see this as government meddling and favoritism. Supporters frame it as an essential investment in ensuring supply chain integrity, which is to say we are highly reliant on partially foreign chip manufacturers for a strategic asset. This is a way to sort of shore up our national supply of these things in the event of a war primarily with China.
Where do we come down on this? Is this, I feel like, I feel like this room for a split here. Like, is this just more crony capitalism? Is this a smart strategic national investment? What do we make of it?
Judge Glock: I guess I’ll chime in here because I usually weigh in on industrial policy stuff and I think I’ll pleasantly surprise Charles in that I think this was the correct move.
Charles Fain Lehman: Wait, really?
Judge Glock: I do and the important point is that investing tens of billions of dollars in chip companies is a dumb move, but that ship already has sailed. If you were to get angry about that you should have gotten angry about that in 2022 when the CHIPS Act passed when we gave you 50 billion dollars to a bunch of chip companies with zero strings attached, nothing. Pretty much it was, well, we at least got nothing return as the taxpayer. So that is when everyone should get mad. And I don’t think people still appreciate how insane that is. Like people worry about grants given to nonprofits or to local governments. This was giving billions and billions of dollars that just showed up on a corporate accounting sheet with nothing on the other side of it. Credit, $6 billion, debit, nothing. Just the federal government gave you a check to depositing your local bank for nothing. So if that is already going to happen, that that’s already out the door.
Am I glad Lutnick kind of said, hey, why don’t the taxpayers get something in return for this? Yeah, probably. That’s not ideal. Maybe it should have been like a bond stake or some sort of, some debt instrument instead of equity, but it’s non-voting equity. This is not even as bad as the U.S. steel thing where we have the golden chair or Trump can supposedly intervene in U.S. Steel’s operations, this is the taxpayer gets the upside if Intel does well. Now, I wish they hadn’t done it all, but they did it. The money was out the door. Let’s actually get something in return for it.
Charles Fain Lehman: See, to me the question here is like, it’s… we’re sort of limited in the amount of downside the amount of harm that can be done by this because it doesn’t seem like the shares let you vote the government is not going to have sort of overwhelming control over Intel but there is going to be informal influence, right? And some of that influence will probably come by like truth social posts and my concern is like if you want a robust American chip making industry, which matters, right? Like you know, we want to be globally competitive in this because AI is theoretically the next big thing. It’s going to be enormous national strategic interest. It’s going to matter a great deal for our economic competitiveness. We want to be able to compete with China. We want to sort of dominate in this space. If you want all of those things, like I am skeptical that even some degree of government control is the best way to accomplish that as opposed to, you know, you think about targeted investment, you can think about, you know, you can think about advising, you can think about trying to encourage competition. It seems like, you know, this gets into this part of debate about in the new right-leaning economic synthesis, do we really want the state picking winners and losers? This seems like a picking winners and losers moment. Is it ultimately that impactful? Probably not. Is it a net win? Not obviously to me because I think if Intel is already struggling, one of the worst ways to ensure its future competitiveness is going to be federal investment in Intel.
Judge Glock: Yeah, it’s a losing investment, but again, to your point about political influence, that was obviously already happening with the grant process during the Biden administration.
Charles Fain Lehman: You make it more explicit!
Judge Glock: Yeah, I’m not even sure if it’s more explicit necessarily. Like, this is when Gina Raimondo over at Commerce was saying, well, of course, if you’re getting the grants, you’re going to need to do childcare for your workers, because childcare is an important part of gender equity. You’re going to need to do minority business development contracts with favored minority businesses. You’re going to need to do all these sort of things, because we’re dangling $50 billion in front of all these chip companies and we’re going to send you regular updates on what we think your political priorities should be as a chip…Again, I’m 100 percent against that. I think ideally they should get out of this entirely. But that ship has sailed. To me, it just seems like if the debate is narrowed, and maybe we don’t have to narrow the debate right now to that, to this question of, we’re giving Intel $10 billion. Should taxpayers get literally anything in return? The answer to me seems to be yes.
I say the last thing, and I’ll shut up for a hot second then. Michael Schmidt, head of Obama, or rather Biden’s chips division commerce just had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. And he said, yeah, like the point of this was to give away all the money for free and just kind of hope for the best. So this is insane that Trump is trying to get taxpayer return on this. I mean, again, it’s like, well, I guess if that was your point to give away the money with no, for free, then yeah, you shouldn’t get any taxpayer return. But that was a bad idea.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, I think that’s right. think that this is Trump, the president, trying to sort of salvage a better situation out of a very bad situation. Charles, I’m sympathetic to the point. Obviously, even a non-voting stake is still leverage. And what one admin uses to secure fabs, the next could use to impose DEI mandates or union rules or price controls or whatever. But, and, and obviously like once Uncle Sam is your biggest Intel stakeholder, it’s hard to say nom, when like a President AOC comes along demanding more and more and more. But, yeah, the semiconductors are obviously unique. They’re critical to our defense base. They’re essential for AI. And I think it’s worth extraordinary measures to try and bring some, you know, bring something home. But, Judge is right. This is all…the cat’s out of the bag with all of this. The subsidies are in place. We’re just trying to recoup something on the investment. It’s also worth mentioning that Senator Tom Cotton has been right to flag the Intel’s, Intel’s CCP ties, the Chinese Communist Party, and forcing the company to clean up its act under the threat of, you know, government potentially cashing out may have some upside here.
But yeah, generally speaking, if Bernie Sanders is excited about a policy move, which he expressed enthusiasm for in this case, it’s not a great sign, but overall, I think this is President Trump trying to secure something for the American taxpayer with respect to a policy that was foolish and doled out by his predecessor to begin with.
Renu Mukherjee: So I think what the administration should do now, if Bernie Sanders is on board and others in his camp are on board with this, I think what they need is Judge to write an op-ed in City Journal detailing how this is not in fact unprecedented. And it’s just a better version of what has been going on for years upon years. Because it’s being portrayed both on X, other social media platforms, and just in the mainstream media as sort of an unprecedented step that Trump has taken, which first, the history that Judge has detailed for us, that’s not the case at all. And the second point being that if this has been happening, particularly under the Democratic presidents over the years, recently under Biden and grants and all of that, then perhaps Trump is just, you know, he’s playing in a way that the left has played for quite some time, which seems to be his M.O. this time around. know, the left has done these things, and so I’m just going to do them myself to achieve purposes that are beneficial to my voting base.
Charles Fain Lehman: So this was going to be my exit question, but it’s related to the conversation. I’ll make an open-ended exit question. People can engage or not. They can agree or disagree. One question I have is, to what extent is this just sort of the new normal? I think back to the auto bailouts under the Obama administration when the federal government took a large share in Detroit automakers, I think people have perhaps disingenuously been arguing that this is Donald Trump seizing the means of production in this regard. Supporters of Trump can no longer criticize Zohran Mamdani. But there is apparently a cross-partisan, some degree of cross-partisan synthesis now on should the government own corporations? The answer may be yes. Or that is my question is, is this the new normal? Have we moved to a world in which both sides agree that perhaps it’s not a big deal if the government owns major American corporations? Is that like where we are or is this like a flash in the pan? I’ll throw that out to whoever has thoughts on it, as our exit. You’re muted, Judge.
Jesse Arm: He’s just talking and I’m sure saying smart things but he is on mute.
Charles Fain Lehman: But he’s muted.
Judge Glock: No, no, I appropriately muted myself because I was saying something dumb and I knew I was about to say something dumb. So now I’ll say the smart thing. The less dumb thing at least. The less dumb thing is that yes, this is unfortunately the new normal. And like if there’s anything any free-market capitalist should be against, it is the government owning the means of production, investing in businesses. This is a very bad idea writ large, and this has been happening more and more. Is it worse or better than the government just giving out free cash to corporations with nothing else attached to it? Maybe not, that’s at least debatable. But like, the difference is, I think, what we’ve had pre-Trump was mainly bailing out companies in trouble. Like this was the banks, we’ve owned a lot of equity in banks after the 2008 crisis, we did own equity in General Motors after the crisis too. Like we’ve had a lot of history of that.
This stuff about just like a successful ongoing business being owned, that’s a little distinct and you know, I’m definitely against it, but we’re in a situation right now where the government was already throwing out a lot of cash and so we’re in a tough spot.
Charles Fain Lehman: I just feel like one is worse than the other. It’s the government owning stuff. Jesse? Renu?
Judge Glock: I’d say debt, maybe if you would have been happy with the debt and equity, just a debt stake, have, you know, $10 billion in first lien bonds on it. I would have been better with that too than the equity, but yeah.
Jesse Arm: Judge, I’m worried that we’re in danger of importing, you know, kind of Europe’s failed model of industrial policy. I don’t want that to happen. But I wouldn’t assume that is what’s happening yet. And I would also say that this White House is often responsive to public input to a certain extent. I mean, not, you know, what everybody has to say, but I don’t think everything associated with this is papered and finalized yet I think we should wait and see how things play out in the weeks to come around this move Let’s get the details. Let’s see how all this is negotiated. I think Kevin Hassett who’s kind of speaking for the administration on this matter is continuing to say sober, smart things about this in interviews and is clarifying the administration’s position and what all of this actually means, so, you know, let’s not get our panties in a knot or whatever. Let’s keep an open mind and not be panicking and we’ll see how this shakes out.
Charles Fain Lehman: Renu, are panicking?
Renu Mukherjee: I mean, I really don’t like this, but I think I agree with Judge and Jesse that, you know, unfortunately, to me, this is, you know, in a way, the new normal. I will say, though, that does not mean, like, to Jesse’s point, of course, we should wait and see what happens because this White House is more open to and, you know, aware of public opinion in a way that I think other administrations in both parties have not been. At the same time, there is dissent within the Republican Party. I mean, Rand Paul, as one would expect, has been very open about this, that he’s against this, and he’s been sounding the alarm quite a bit. So I don’t think this is going to necessarily happen quietly. I mean, he does this with respect to a lot of things. But yeah, I don’t like this. I think it’s the new normal, but I think there is still a chance to fight this even within the party.
Charles Fain Lehman: See, Renu’s persuading me I’m wrong, because I never want to agree with Rand Paul. On 95 percent of issues, I’m like, no, that’s due south.
All right, before we go, I want to talk about a little bit of lighter news. I think all of us saw the clip from over the weekend of Zohran Mamdani attempting to demonstrate his masculinity at Men’s Day in Brooklyn. He was asked to bench press 135 pounds. He could not do it. He was roasted by Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo for doing this.
I can’t bench press 135 pounds, but also I am not running to be mayor of New York, so I have to ask the panel, is Zohan Mamdani fit enough to be mayor? What do we make of this story? What’s going on here?
Jesse Arm: Can I be honest? My reaction when I saw that, I kind of think that, actually, that may help him with his voters. I think a lot of voters who probably can’t bench 135 pounds see that video and find it only a little bit more relatable. Just another reason to, you know, get excited about Zohran the Weak.
Charles Fain Lehman: Judge? I feel like Judge can probably… Yeah, I don’t know what Judge can bench. I feel like it’s substantial.
Judge Glock: Well, it shouldn’t be, I was saying the obvious, it shouldn’t be a qualification for higher office. Again, maybe the military, you got to show your bench press abilities. But like, let’s just go back to the normal stuff. Sure, you can eat a hot dog well, know, sure you can throw out a first pitch in a baseball game. We have a bunch of stupid rituals America has already agreed on for our elected officials to do before they go into office and bench pressing should not be a new one. It’s just like, it’s just not a good standard. Back to like baseball pitches and prove you don’t eat pizza with a fork and a knife and then you’re done.
Charles Fain Lehman: I look forward to seeing Mamdani throw out the first pitch on opening day. That’ll be interesting. You got to practice for that one. Have people seen the clip of George Bush throwing out the first pitch after 9/11? Yes. Great. A great moment. Renu, what’s your take on the bench press story?
Judge Glock: Great clip.
Renu Mukherjee: So I agree with Jesse that this is going to make him more endearing to his supporters. But I recall, you know, Charles, you, Jesse, and I worked on the MI’s first focus group recently.
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s available in City Journal.
Renu Mukherjee: And yes, exclusively in City Journal. And so many of these undecided voters use phrases like, Mamdani, you know, he can’t, he doesn’t have sharp elbows and he’s going to get beaten around by Trump, and he’s going to get beaten around and just even by like New York state politics, et cetera. And so I think while he’s endearing to his supporters, this makes him seem quite weak and perhaps concerning to undecideds that think that he’s not going to be able to go toe to toe with Trump. I’ll also add that in terms of just aesthetics for politics, I think as 2026 approaches, even though this is the mayoralty in New York City, with the Democratic Party having this sort of young men problem, whatever, I could see Trump war room or something, just having this on a loop, going and going and going, saying the Democratic Party, the new male face of the Democratic Party can’t even bench 135. So, I think it’s bad for him with undecideds and it could potentially make for some funny campaign videos as 2026 approaches.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair. Okay, I will leave it there. That’s about all the time that we have. Thank you to our panelists. Thank you as always to our producer Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode or even if you didn’t, don’t forget to like, subscribe on YouTube, other platforms, Spotify, wherever you listen to or download, digest this podcast. Don’t forget to leave us comments, questions down below. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
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