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Jonah Goldberg

lines on the record
77
first
2018-10-25
most recent
2018-10-25
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1
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  1. “I don't love that argument. I think it's insufficient, but it's intellectually and politically defensible. But instead, what they have to say is that, you know, under Comrade Trump, we're going to get the greatest wheat harvests we've ever seen east of the Urals. They have to build them up into something. And that has a teaching effect on people. And it has a corrupting effect.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “His business model. Yeah. And so the people who are redefining what is good to be winning and fighting, right? Those are amoral concepts. Those are Nichayan concepts to a certain extent. And you see people, and so whenever I say on Twitter or elsewhere, you know, the man doesn't have a good character, people come out of David Horroids, all these guys. They come attack me, and yet they can't come up with a definition of good character for the guy. But if people said instead, oh. Yeah, look, he's crude. He's borish. I don't like the way he tweets. He tweets like an escape monkey from a cocaine study. Fine. But look at what we're getting.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The problem is in the realm, and this is why I say it's a psychological phenomena, in the realm of talk radio and cable news and the fever swamps of the internet. They have to convince themselves that Donald Trump is a good man. And so what is happening is in all sorts of ways the definition of what is good is being bent and corrupted to fit the man. I've been asking people for two and a half years now, give me a definition of good character that Donald Trump can clear. There isn't one, and I'm not even just talking about the sex stuff, right? I mean, forget the affairs, forget that he's got more ex wives than the previous 45 presidents combined, all that kind of stuff. In business, he just bragged about lying and cheating. He bragged about betraying his partners.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I would have no problem if we were problems, but I find it utterly defensible as an intellectual proposition to have a transactional relationship with Donald Trump. What bothers me and what I think is so corrupting of conservatism and of the Republican Party is that we are hardwired evolutionarily to resist the idea that our leaders are bad people. We want to put faith in them, right? That's why Bill Rusher, the publisher of National Review, always used to tell young writers when they started, put not your faith in princes, right? Politicians will always disappoint you. Not because they're bad people. I mean, some are, but because their incentive structures are just different than what an idealistic 22-year-old out of college who's taking a huge entrepreneurial risk to write for an obscure magazine, you know, we're different kinds of creatures. And so I have no problem with people saying, look, we're getting the judges. We're getting, we got tax cuts, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “He was on the updated. Yeah. But that kind of gets my point about how these third party institutions are sort of acting like parties. The Federal Society was credentializing. Trump, in a way that Trump himself couldn't do”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And it's the wrong lesson. And it's the wrong lesson for Trump's biggest supporters because they have now internalized once again that the way you win is to be the most obnoxious, most cantankerous, most pugnacious person in the fight. And that's a problem on the college level, that kind of thinking, and it's a problem in our national politics. I wish that friends of mine like Bill Crystal and others would take more credit for the fact that the reason why Kavanaugh or Gorsuch are on the bench Because Trump's skeptical conservatives forced him to. Use that list. Instead, you get the sort of Sean Hannity argument that this proves that Donald Trump is passionate about the Constitution. He's not passionate about the Constitution. No, in fact, he...”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Most of the billionaires I've ever met or read about would not think it worth their time to go on YouTube hawking stakes, right? And so Trump kind of is a black swan in that way. And because of his ego, he retroactively thinks that anything he did is the reason why he's where he is. So my problem with that attack on Ford part is that so many of Trump's supporters and Trump himself think that's why they won the Kavanaugh fight when in fact he put the Kavanaugh confirmation in more jeopardy at that moment than at any other point because the whole goal was to get Sue Collins Jeff Flake and Murkowski to vote and by him attacking Ford he put those votes in jeopardy. He didn't rally the troops. He put the whole thing in the crosshairs in a way. But the lesson he takes from it is that's why we want.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “There's an additional problem. I'm a big believer. I've been arguing this for a couple years now that Trumpism isn't an ideological or intellectual program. It's a psychological phenomenon, both in terms of understanding the president and understanding his biggest supporters. So part of the problem that I think defines a lot of the stuff that you're talking about is that in economics, they have this phrase winner's bias. There's this great cartoon of this guy who says, you know, they told me to give up. They told me there was no chance. But I stuck to my gut. I kept buying those lottery tickets. And now, and I won. Donald Trump is very much unlike, you must know a lot of rich people, right? I know a lot of rich people. Most of them care passionately about their integrity and their reputation.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, no, this is a big problem for my colleagues at Fox News, for the other television networks as well, in that even if you are a rigorous, serious, committed defender of something called Trumpism, the problem is that Trump himself is beholden to no coherent intellectual or ideological program. And so at some point, it's sort of like, do you play the man or do you play the ball? And I made this point when that Julius Krines guy came out with that pro-Trump intellectual journal, which I was very much in favor of them doing, even though I disagree with a lot of the ideas, because I like intellectual journals that try to flesh out these things. I was a huge fan of the public interest. I mean, I read it religiously. But I predicted that they're going to have this dilemma of do they defend the ever-serpentining? Or do they defend the ideas?”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, no, look, I mean, it's like when you see political, you see some political consultants on TV, I don't mean you, I mean the kind of political consultants that other political consultants I know have never heard of, you know, but they give them parties GOP strategists and they just happen to be”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Even though they wear a lot of different hats, and one of them says writer or pundit or analyst, the one that is most snugly on their head is party guy. And so you had a lot of people who at the end of the day were party hacks. I don't mean that necessarily in a pejorative sense, except for the fact that they were dishonest about it, who thought that at the end of the day, their job was to defend the Republican candidate rather than tell the truth as they saw it.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And so, what has happened almost invisibly is that a whole archipelago of institutions that are essentially like consultants are de facto party organs. And they serve as sort of de facto party organs, Fox News, MSNBC. They do a lot of the work the parties used to do, various think tanks do that too. And magazines like National Review and the New Republic and the nation. They do a lot of the sort of internal stuff of filtering candidates, vetting candidates, informing voters about candidates and all the rest. And so the problem was that I think in 2016, Donald Trump was kind of a stress test. And a lot of people who thought they had the same job description that I do, when push came to shove, after he got the nomination, decided that”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I'm not. I mean, this is one of these points. I mean, it gets into the larger political moment, but part of my whole... Argument about what my role is in the era of Trump is that I don't think I should change my positions about all sorts of things just because the guys are Republican. And I'm not going to, you know, so I called myself a never trumper until election day. And then he won. And for me, never Trump meant I was never going to endorse him. And I was never going to vote for him. But you only have one president at a time, so you hope for the best. But the one thing I wasn't going to do is lie about him. And I have this theory that I get in part from the political scientist, Steve Tell, is that one of the reasons we're in the mess that we're in, at least on the right, is that there's this great irony that we live in one of the most partisan moments of all time, or at least the last hundred years. But the parties themselves have never been weaker.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That's right. My mom was the lady who advised Linda Tripp to record her conversations with Monica and to And that the dress should be kept I got dragged into some of all that at the time. Funny, it's like this is the 20th anniversary of all that, and all these people wanted to sort of do these interviews and stuff either to get through me, to get to my mom, or to talk to me about all of it. And, you know, I have some regrets, but I just have so little interest in rehashing all that. I think, to be honest, in terms of The political arguments at the time in terms of sexual harassment and all those kinds of things, I think we've seen a lot of vindication, at least for the things I was saying 20 years ago about all of that.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So I don't think she's never told me that she ever got anything good. It was sort of a function of. I think Murray Stanz was the Bagman cutout for this whole thing. Was the paranoia of the Nixon creep crowd to cover all their bases. Yeah.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Basically, yeah. She was reporting basically the way she tells the story is she just told a lot of stories about how Hunter S. Thompson was sleeping off his booze every day. I think he wrote about that.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah. So again, my mom was a colorful, is a colorful lady. And this was a big scandal at the time. I didn't have any memory of it except for maybe seeing Press in the lobby of our building on 84th Street. She worked many layers below my dad for something called the women's news service. And when this came out, my dad immediately issued his resignation letter and my mom did too. They accepted my mom's and they should have and rejected my dad because she was.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I mean, my dad was a much more deliberate, both my parents were also writers. My mom was a ghost writer for a long time. Then she wrote books on her own. She was a conservative literary agent. When I was a little kid, she was a mounted policeman in Central Park, which was interesting. And she worked briefly in the Kennedy and Johnson White House back before, as my dad put it, went to work on her and moved her rightward. So it was an interesting upbringing”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Real newspaper man's sensibility of always saying, you know what would make a great article? I mean, that's how we began. I would say one out of five of his conversations because he just thought, and since he was in charge of assigning reporters and feature writers to over 1,000, 2,000 newspapers in effect, he always had someone he could go get right whatever he wanted to write.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, so he was one of these guys who, I don't think he was ever fired, but one media company kept buying the next media company. So he ran something called the North American News Alliance, which is one of the early big syndicates. He worked at Scripps Howard. Scripps ended up owning United Media. And so he was an editor for most of his career, but then moved more to the business side. United Media owned peanuts and Garfield and a bunch of those kinds of things. So he knew a lot about comic strips and purchased that. But he went through his whole life.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “She's episcopalian. That's right. So it was a mixed marriage. I was raised Jewish. I went to Rota Sholem Day School on the upper west side, which was the first, I believe the first Reformed Jewish day school in the country, where mostly liberal Jewish parents wanted to raise their kids Jewish, but not too Jewish. And I was Bar Mitzvud. But my mom added some flares to it. We had bagpipers playing Hava Nagila at our party and that kind of thing. Yeah, that's a first. It actually sounds pretty cool.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “She would grip in Virginia, yeah, and I was injured, Virginia, and her dad was a very esteemed nuclear physicist who's actually, I believe was a roommate of Oppenheimer's at one point or something like that and was a Navy physicist and he actually designed the precursor to sonar. He had the patent for it. She grew up in a much more sort of prim and proper household.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, because back then they would recruit Down there. And so my dad and his two brothers were the first members of the Goldberg family, I believe, to graduate from grade school, never mind high school or college. And my dad... Ran away from home the way nice Jewish boys from the Bronx ran away from home. He graduated from high school and he was like 15 and went to the University of Michigan. My mom was much, she ran away from home the way. She was from the.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “1800s, yes, like the. Lithuania, Poland, that whole realm. My grandfather ran a garment factory in the garment district and my grandmother ran a sewing machine and her”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, the Goldberg side, they're from that whole early 1900s, early, not probably late 1900s, run from the pogroms, you know, the late 1980s.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “My mom grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, back when that was still a southern town. And my dad grew up in the Bronx on Gunhill Road.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “No, my standard joke is we were like Christians in ancient Rome. And, you know, you meet in Central Park and you draw a little sea in the dirt and say, I'll meet you under the catacombs at Zaybars. Yeah, so I go back and forth about this. I have friends who grew up in the Soviet Union and They claim that if I had grown up there, you know, like sometimes wonder whether or not the context is different. If I grew up in some small conservative southern town, when I've grown up a liberal, I like to think not, but who knows? And My parents were pretty political. My dad was a journalist. My mom was a lot of different things. But I never really realized how political I was probably until college. It just never really, it wasn't a big part of my identity.”

    2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source