What does Noah think of the latest reports on President Trump’s decision not to decide…yet?

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-31

[00:00:01]Good morning, glory, and evening, grace, America. I hope your weekend is going to be a great one for you. I'm spending part of it with Noah C. Rothman, who's been a guest a lot on the program, but Blood in Progress, took him away from his normer normal spot this week because his brand new book, Blood in Progress.

[00:00:17]He's got to be out there promoting Blood in Progress. And I have a specific Blood in Progress question for you, Noah, after we do the breaking news. Here's the breaking news uh from courtesy of J Jason Broaddsky on X New York Times.

[00:00:31]Quote, "President Trump's meeting in the situation room lasted about two hours, but the president did not reach a decision on any new deal with Iran, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak about internal deliberations." Quote, "The administration believes it is still close to an agreement, but that there are certain matters being debated, including the unfreezing of funds for the Iranians, the official said. My comment on that, Noah, and then I'm going to go to yours, which I just posted, is I hope President Trump provides zero relief to the rump regime until all the enriched uranium, including the 3% stuff, is removed from the country and all suspected sites, including pickaxe mountain, are inspected and destroyed. Destroying nuclear Iran's nuclear program is the defining accomplishment of his presidency. That's how I see it. How do you see it? that not only the defining accomplishment of his presidency, I I wrote on the eve what turned out to be the eve of operation epic fury that the president's legacy will be defined by his efforts to reshape the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East. Full stop. Iran being the final piece of that puzzle. But it it was a project that began in 2017 with the the very nassent outlines of what became the Abraham Accords with a intelligence sharing relationship between the Sunni states and Israel. And that is the president's legacy. he has the opportunity to cement it or fatally mudd muddy it depending on his determination of where this ceasefire talk is going. And sometimes I hear the president himself say, you know, no release of funds except for performance or rewards. And then I read on background reporting from some murky sources, usually out of Axios, but usually then often confirmed by CNN or NBC or others about the details of this proposal. All of which make me queasy and very little I feel like I can rely on. These are just rumors floating around. No Bloom who produces the commentary podcast had a great line. He said following these the will he won't he stories around the Iran [snorts] deal is like mock executions. It is just a psychologically brutal thing to subject yourself to and so it's probably healthier just not to.

[00:02:39]>> Now yesterday I had to fly coast to coast. I had a lot of time with u books and so I was reading Churchill's the finest hour volume two of his World War II memoirs and we're at the point where Italy declares war on a reeling France and England and FDR goes on the radio in June before his election in November and just denounces Italians in Italy as having taken the dagger and stabbed their neighbor in the back. And Churchill said, you know, I thought what about the Italian-American vote, but I'm glad that the president FDR has his resolves which triumphed over politic. I think Donald Trump has his resolves about Iran. Do you agree with me? Uh to the Yes. To the extreme frustration, I think, of some of his Republican colleagues because at times he he conveys that resolve by saying, "Listen, I don't care about the midterm elections or I don't care about the status of the economy." which and he's trying to convey that he is 100% committed to this project and nothing else will dissuade him from pursuing it to completion which is valuable especially in a wartime president but the way he talks about it does create uh opportunities for Democratic admakers to make Republican lives much more difficult and they're not shy about saying so behind closed doors >> now I want to go to a a part of blood in progress which I didn't bring the book with me I I'll get it again when I'm back on the on the east coast Wednesday, but I am of the of the view that we're like at 1933 levels of anti-semitism in this country. That so much so that Nick Lemon, who wrote this amazing book, Returning, he's a left liberal Jew, but he can't. This book should win National Book Award Pulitzer. It won't because he's Jewish. I think we're getting to the point that Jews are actually afraid of going out with their Kipa aunt. I think it's really the worst of my lifetime. I'm 70 years old.

[00:04:32]Is this a necessary part of the blood and progress cycle? No. That that the left goes through an anti-semitism cycle. I It's It's certainly related. Um and I think it's definitely the worst environment in for anti-semitism in my lifetime. It's so much worse in Europe than it is here. And it's really bad here. But this didn't just happen overnight. Didn't even happen in the immediate aftermath of October 7th. Even though though that was the trigger, the perverse trigger for a lot of the violent anti-semitism we've been experiencing in New York City. It's been going on for the better part of a decade and only getting worse. Uh visibly Jewish people have been being attacked on the streets of New York City all throughout even the Dela Delasio years to say nothing of Eric Adams tenure and even today. Um and in Blood and Progress I do describe the degree to which a lot of the narratives that are fermenting violence against Jews internationally and at home uh have roots in Soviet soil. a lot of the narratives that you hear expressed by anti-Israel forces and therefore designed to incriminate Jews for being um proximate to adjacent to the Zionist project emanate in a Soviet effort to discredit the Israeli state after Soviet investments in the Arab armies that were defeated in 1967 and 1973 uh proved to not be generating the returns that the Kremlin expected. So they sought to uh articulate narratives that would discredit the Jewish state.

[00:05:58]Among them uh that it was a colonial outpost, a neoc colonial project, an enemy to proletarian civilization, a white enclave in the brown global south, um that it had been conducting genocide campaigns against Palestinians and Arabs, that it used rape as a weapon of war, famine as a weapon of war. All of these narratives are frozen in amber.

[00:06:19]They they are unfalsifiable in the minds of their believers. and they creep back into the discourse every now and then and sometimes in an unreconstructed version of what we were exposed to in 1973 which was retailed documented evidence retailed by KGB elements to far-left reactionary and guerilla movements inside the United States designed to fulment tension racial tension uh internal dissension and to frustrate American geopolitical objectives >> well the same thing we're still experiencing >> it is the same thing but It's much deeper in the Democratic party than it's ever been. I know people want me to say it's on the right, but I just don't think it is to the extent that uh you go beyond a couple of podcasts, it's just not there. And those podcasts are entertainment value, not substant.

[00:07:05]They're not changing the opinion of Standing with Israel in the Republican party, it's still like 100%. However, Democrats had a Michigan Senate primary uh this week and they wholly failed. The the reporters, the moderator wholly failed to talk about Israel or anti-Zionism, much less anti-semitism.

[00:07:25]It's all one thing to me, but they wholly failed. Do you think, Noah, in the 2027 and 2028 debates that Democrats who want to be their nominee will have, will the moderators press on this issue?

[00:07:40]not just of Israel, but of Jews. Because the Democrats have a Jewish problem, >> not if the moderators are aligned with Democratic objectives. They know this is not a winning issue for them. They know the party's activist class has them in a vice and wants to hear things that make the party's nominees less palatable to the general electorate. It's shocking that Michigan debate did not focus at least a little bit on the degree to which not just the Israel and the Jews.

[00:08:10]Radical Islam has become a wedge issue >> in the Michigan Senate primary. It is a divisive issue on the American left.

[00:08:19]They don't quite know how to deal with it, which is shocking given the our proximity to the September 11th attacks, which is really not all that long ago, given our our lifetimes. One of the candidates there struggles to say whether or not the Iranian regime should dissolve or whether it was valuable for us to dispense with the Iranian leadership, which has hundreds of American bodies on their hands, thousands. If you if you you know really play out the the the Iranian efforts to to kill Americans and kill our allies overseas over the course of the 50 years that the Islamic State Islamic Republic rather has been in existence. It's something that really kind of makes Abdel El Say who's one of the leading candidates for this nomination queasy to denounce radical Islamists who want to see the United States destroyed and its people murdered. That seems like something that the Michiganders should get a real eyeful of and be able to evaluate that they were deprived by.

[00:09:16]>> And I think it's so disparaging of ArabAmericans like who I know many of and who are on both sides. They're both red and blue ArabAmerican. But for the moderators not to bring it up is cowardly. Don't take the job if you won't ask the hard questions. You agree with that?

[00:09:33]>> See, no. I don't think it's cowardly. I think it was malicious because I think they don't want answers. Yeah, I don't think they want the answers. They certainly don't want to put their candidates in a position to say something that will put them crosswise with the activist class or to create more tensions within the party that exposes the extent to which radical Islamist terrorism is a dividing line within the party. They know that reflects badly on Democrats. So why even bring it up? So yeah, I think there's more intent there.

[00:10:00]>> That that's interesting. I have to think about that. Noah C Rothman, follow him on X at Noah C Rothman. Go to Amazon, get Blood in Progress. It will bring you up to speed very quickly on where we are headed, which is back to the 60s, which is not good. We're already there. We're just already there. And the bombings haven't started yet, but we're already there. Thank you, Noah. Coming right back with Abe Greenwall, executive editor of commentary. Stay tuned.

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