Monday on the RealClearPolitics podcast, Tom Bevan, Carl Cannon, and Richard Porter discuss President Trump threatening Iran with an economic “D-Day” and the trade war with Canada restarting. Also, the president stumped for Republican Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina over the weekend.
Plus, the panel debates news that the Washington Post has been ordered to rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah after an arbiter found no “gross misconduct,” and the latest culture war controversy in the WNBA.
Listen live weekdays at 11:00 a.m. Eastern on SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly Channel 111, or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or other platforms.
Walworth, Cannon, and Bevan discuss whether President Trump can bring Iran to heel with the threat of an “economic D-Day” in new sanctions, and how to balance genuinely weakening the Islamic Republic without undermining the dollar, strengthening Persian nationalism, or turning ordinary Iranians against the U.S.
“Even accounting for his blunderbuss rhetorical style, I thought ‘economic D-Day’ was unfortunate … It’s like the reverse of the Marshall Plan, not D-Day,” Carl Cannon said. “Either way, I think it’s risky to wage war by threatening to starve people.”
“Way too many rhetorical flourishes,” Porter agreed.
“We can only use the dollar and the dollar-based economic system so many times,” Porter said. “Do we ultimately undermine the dollar, which is the greatest asset the United States has, by relying solely on dollar and dollar-based mechanisms for trade in order to affect change in other countries?”
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08:50 — New Trade War With Canada
The panel turns to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walking away from stalled trade negotiations with the U.S., highlighting how decades of integrated supply chains make this kind of trade fight really difficult to wage inside continental North America.
“Donald Trump is the un-Ronald Reagan,” Cannon said. “These three economies really have been intertwined for 50 years or longer.”
“Carney is only prime minister because the president was joking about making Canada the 51st state,” Porter added. “But if eight provinces don’t sell bourbon from Kentucky, guess what? Kentuckians notice.”
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14:16 — Trump: “Pretend I’m on the Ballot”
The group asks whether President Trump’s endorsement of interim Sen. Darline Graham for a permanent seat is politically smart. Could asking South Carolina voters to imagine he is on the ballot be the high-water mark of a Trump endorsement’s effectiveness in GOP primaries?
“To me, he’s mixing apples and oranges,” Cannon said. “For Democrats, Trump is always on the ballot. But Republicans don’t turn out when Trump isn’t on the ballot.”
“We don’t know Darline Graham. We don’t really know where she stands on any issues. We just know she doesn’t know where Taiwan is,” he said.
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18:47 — Are the DSA Just the Jacobins Again?
Jonathan Turley discusses his new book titled “Rage and the Republic,” his latest article: “Hasan Piker Is the Hateful Left’s Pied Piper,” and whether the Democratic Socialists are something new or just “Jacobins again.”
“If his antisemitism doesn’t turn people off, certainly his singing will. I mean, both are remarkably off-tune,” Turley quipped. “I talk about rage and how it has taken over our politics, how it’s now threatening our very constitutional system. This is that very image.”
“We go through these periods, and eventually the rage burns off. So at some point, we all look in the mirror and realize that we’ve become grotesque, that we loved it too much,” he said. “We like the rage because it allows us to hate completely. It allows us not to think about the other person, or even try to talk to the other person, and in the case of Charlie Kirk, kill the other person.”
“If you take the DSA platform and lay it out over the Jacobins,” Turley said, “It is remarkable what the overlap is.”
“My book looks at both [the American and French] revolutions and asks: Why did one become the world’s oldest, most stable democracy, and the other became known as the Terror? And the reason was precisely what the DSA and others are calling for today: more direct democratic authority, a unicameral system, all these devices that the Framers rejected.”
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39:05 — WaPo Forced to Rehire Columnist
The panel discusses an arbitrator’s ruling requiring The Washington Post to reinstate Karen Attiah after finding the paper failed to establish gross misconduct in connection with the social-media posts that led to her firing.
“That’s just not a sustainable situation where you can own a newspaper, but the inmates running the asylum,” Cannon said. “If you own a newspaper, you don’t have to employ someone whose values are completely opposite of yours.”
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46:38 — Enes Kanter Freedom Ejected from WNBA Game
The episode ends with Enes Kanter Freedom’s ejection from a WNBA game over an altercation with a player, and how the WNBA may be entering a strange kind of golden age in which ideological fights, player drama, and Caitlin Clark’s star power are combining to generate unprecedented attention.
“Honestly, don’t you sort of want to go to a WNBA game now?” Porter said.
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