The Wave Is Coming | Ruminant

For the first time in like, 100 years, Jonah Goldberg is bachin’ it up. With no dogs and no wife, The Ruminant is on time and cooking, diving into the Kennedy Center, the Indiana Dunes, Korean War-era debates, Donald Trump as the establishment, the three “M’s” of the midterms, postwar politics, sovereigntism, Canada, John Ratcliffe’s trip to Russia, Vladimir Putin’s designs on Europe, and guilty white liberals. Show Notes: The Remnant is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including the Saturday Ruminant, audio versions of all our articles and newsletters, and Jonah’s twice-weekly G-File—⁠click here⁠. Instructions on how to set up your members-only feed can be found here, and if you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, enormous lizards roamed the Earth. More immediately prior to that, Jonah spent two decades at National Review, where he was a senior editor, among other things. He is also a bestselling author, longtime columnist for the Los Angeles Times, commentator for CNN, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When he is not writing the G-File or hosting The Remnant podcast, he finds real joy in family time, attending to his dogs and cat, and blaming Steve Hayes for various things. The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings. Music 0:00 [instrumental music] [groaning] Ladies and gentlemen, uh, Music 0:16 could I please have your attention? Can you dig it? Jonah Goldberg 0:24 [cheering] Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. It's amazing how early your day starts when you don't have to walk dogs for, you know, an hour or any of that other stuff. And I have, I have a day. [sighs] So many things in my cabeza to talk about. Um, I tried to do, uh, just a bunch of bullet points on a piece of paper, and it looks like a doctor was prescribing some meds and had a stroke at the same time and was completely illegible, but we'll get there. Something easy, I saw these clips of Howard Lutnick outside, I guess, the court yesterday, um, explaining why Trump needs to renovate the Kennedy Center and have his name on it. And it's also very, very reasonable. And, of course, he's not gonna put his name on it 'cause, you know, uh, the actual law... I mean, this is not Lutnick's point, but the actual law is just, like, friggin' clear-cut. Like, the law just says, "Congress passed a law creating the Kennedy Memorial, you know, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Cultural Arts," blah, blah, blah. It says, "This is a memorial for John F. Kennedy. It's not to be for anybody else. Um, this is an act of Congress," yada, yada, yada. It was just lawless egoism that launched this thing in the 1st place. So they've abandoned that, and they're going instead towards this idea that Trump really just... He needs, he needs... And this is the part I loved about Lutnick's press conference. If we can get the clips in here, that would be great. The president just... He, he needs to do this 'cause this is how he relaxes. Clip 2:09 Let's just go through something for a second. The president works all day, every day, and there are 2 things that he does for enjoyment. He plays golf on the weekend, and he builds. He loves to build. So this... Like, why are we talking about this? This is what he enjoys. So late at night, 11 o'clock at night, he calls me and wants to talk about things he's building because it's fun for him. This is his enjoyment. And you've seen he's the most transparent person. He talks all day about the things he's doing. Jonah Goldberg 2:39 It's all such pathetic, sad nonsense, right? And it's like, uh, it's all this stuff about how the board, you know... Uh, the board understands that it can't be the Trump Kennedy Center anymore, sorta, wink, wink. But instead it'll be... What, what they'd like to do is to recognize that the incredible work that Trump is gonna be doing to renovate this thing, and so we should, you know, we should have some sort of name on it, Trump's name on it somewhere, somehow to recognize the work that he did to save this building, which is, of course, collapsing and all this stuff. And it is all pretextual nonsense. It is, like, laughably stupid from soup to nuts. And look, I get it. There are people who fall back on the increasingly desperate, "Oh, it's Trump derangement syndrome to be bothered by this." And frankly, I don't really care very much about the Kennedy Center. I never go to the Kennedy Center. I am not a huge JFK fan. But this whole thing has been so unbelievably tacky by basically putting these, you know, jamokes and suck-ups on the board of the Kennedy Center who then do a sorta dear leader suck-up to Trump by putting his name on it, and then allowing Trump to go around saying, "This wasn't my idea," which it may not have been, right? Because what he does is he encourages the people around him to understand that the way you suck up to him is by putting his name on stuff. But the idea that the DOJ is now threatening that the building may just have to be torn down if Trump can't have his way, that's not people acting, you know, spontaneously, extemporaneously as suck-ups on Trump's behalf. This is Trump's Department of Justice doing this. And on the merits, if he had done this stuff the right way, same thing with the East Wing and same thing with a lot of this stuff, whether I agreed with the ballroom or not or whatever, I just couldn't really care less. But, like, when it's part of a larger pattern about Trump's lawlessness and his, you know, his just weird, creepy, weird narcissism kicking in, you know. I mean, like, I know a lot of you listening to this don't live in Washington, DC. His face is plastered on a lot of buildings. His name is on a lot of buildings. It's weird. If I had described something like this to you 10 years ago, you would have said, "1st of all, that'll never happen, and 2nd of all," you would have said, "that would be really weird." But we've become acclimatized to it, and so we, we tolerate it more than we should. But this thing, this, uh, this thing of, "Oh, it's not a big deal," cuts both ways. Because if it's not a big deal, why is Trump spending so much time on it, right? 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